I also dismissed Kant as silly because of companion guides to Kant while reading him. It’d be cool to go back to read him again now, if I had the time.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:01 🎙️ *Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology* - Thomas's epistemology centers on the principle that "being is what the intellect first conceives." - The intellect never has a conception of nothing; thought is intentional and always about something. - Thought is made available to the intellect through conceptual episodes, and being brings into operation the conceptual capacities for the world to be available to us. 09:31 🤔 *Addressing Skepticism in Thomistic Epistemology* - Skepticism presupposes the possibility of having a thought without content. - Thomas's theistic account rejects the idea of empty thoughts, emphasizing intentionality in all thought. - Descartes' solution to skepticism involves God, while Thomistic epistemology focuses on using intellect and will properly to avoid falsehood. 16:03 🌐 *Kant's Challenge to Traditional Epistemology* - Kant addresses the problem of how formal thought about contingent objects is possible. - Traditional epistemologies, like rationalism and empiricism, struggle with the origin of conceptual content in knowledge. - Kant's view challenges the idea that perception is conceptually naked and explores the construction of conceptual content in the mind. 19:54 🔄 *Two Interpretations of Kant: Idealism vs. Non-Idealism* - Two interpretations of Kant emerge: one emphasizing idealism (Camp Smith) and another questioning the idea of constructing reality (Gavin Kerr). - Camp Smith's translation portrays Kant akin to Berkeley, suggesting a construction of reality. - Kerr emphasizes a non-idealist approach, challenging the notion that Kant denies knowledge of real, non-mental objects. 20:22 🌐 *Introduction to Kantian Idealism* - Explanation of Kant's transcendental idealism. - Kant's idea that intuition without concepts is blind and thoughts without intuition are empty. 22:40 🤔 *Kant's Solution to the Critical Problem* - Kant's approach to the critical problem of how high is the object available to us in terms of its form or content. - The role of intuition in putting us in contact with an object and providing conceptual content to thought. 23:32 🌈 *Intuition, Thought, and Conceptual Content* - The significance of intuition in giving thought its content. - Understanding Kant's idea that intuition has conceptual content derived from objects. 26:29 🔄Rejecting *Correspondence Theories of Truth* - Kant's rejection of correspondence theories of truth. - The intentional nature of thought and the problem with empty thoughts in correspondence theories. 28:06 🌌 *A Priori Forms and Categories* - The role of a priori forms (space and time) in structuring sensibility. - Categories of understanding as recognitional capacities allowing us to recognize features of objects. 30:36 🌏 *Phenomena and Noumena Distinction* - Kant's transcendental distinction between phenomena and noumena. - Rejecting the ontological distinction and emphasizing the epistemological nature of this division. 33:39 🤖 *Transcendental Idealism and Intellectual Contribution* - Kant as a transcendental idealist, emphasizing intellectual conditions. - The agency of the intellect in understanding empirical objects. 38:29 🔄 *Homogeneity of Being and Intellect* - Connecting Thomas Aquinas and Kant on being as what the intellect first conceives. - The conceptual nature of being and the homogeneity between being and the intellect. 40:21 🌐 *Avoiding Friction in Epistemology* - Addressing McDowell's notion of avoiding spinning into the void in epistemology. - Rejecting the empiricist notion of a given and emphasizing engagement with a conceptually structured world. 41:54 🤔 *Thomistic-Kantian Connection* - Kerr discusses the correlation between a priori/a posteriori and universal/contingent ideas. - Hume's view on metaphysics and Kant's attempt to establish synthetic a priori knowledge. - Objects switching on categories in thought, allowing for synthetic a priori knowledge in metaphysics. 43:57 🤯 *Tackling Skepticism and Transcendental Idealism* - Kerr addresses skepticism motivated by the presupposition of empty thought and the challenge of justifying it. - Kant's transcendental idealism justifying metaphysics and countering skepticism. - Critique of the circular reasoning in using skepticism to justify its presupposition. 46:11 🌐 *Thomistic-Kantian Position and McDowell* - Kerr explains the Thomistic-Kantian position's motivation against skepticism. - Connection with John McDowell's view on intuitions without concepts and thoughts without intuitions. - Kerr's article on McDowell and Aquinas exploring convergences. 48:16 🧠 *Contribution to Contemporary Epistemology* - Kerr discusses the need for a metaphysical stage setting before delving into detailed epistemological issues. - Emphasis on understanding the relationship between mind and world in contemporary epistemology. - Mention of Michael Dummett's work on origins of analytical philosophy and its relevance. 50:21 🌐 *Action Theory and Neo-Kantian Approach* - Kerr highlights the influence on action theory by rejecting the myth of the given. - Elizabeth Anscombe's perspective on intention as the form of action. - Cross-pollination with contemporary action theory, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. 54:12 📚 *Future Projects and Thomistic Contributions* - Kerr gives a teaser on his upcoming projects, including a Resurrection Book and revisiting his doctoral thesis. - Structure of the potential publication, covering the Neo-Thomist reaction to Kant and a realist reading of Kant in the second half of the 20th century. - Kerr's involvement in editing a volume on Thomism Revisited, contributing to a volume on Summa Contra Gentiles, and his participation in a Judo competition.
Always great to have Dr. Kerr on the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, check out his article "McDowell and Aquinas: Philosophical Convergences" for more. muse.jhu.edu/article/636067/pdf
Pat & Jim and Pat & Gaven are the cream of the discursive crop when it comes to RU-vid philosophy. Thanks a lot to both of you for this one. For the majority of the show, I was fist pumping as Gaven discussed his reading of Kant. However, at around the 34m. mark (roughly), Gaven makes a claim that Kant's phenomenal-noumenal distinction is a purely epistemic one. To me, that implies the distinction derives from a lack of understanding; in theory then, the agent can close this gap, and if Being is "for" the intellect (and vice versa), we have a gap that should be closeable in principle. This is definitely not Kant's position. Furthermore, as long as you preserve duality between mind and object, it can't fail to be an ontological gap. If you hold that it is merely epistemic, you're going to undermine the knowledge claim as you are making it (one would require, as it were, a mind-independent triangulation - and validation - of true knowledge in order to determine that the gap had been closed, which is just the sort of thing Kant recognized as holding the gap open a priori). For some object X, only if the epistemic-agentive cause (of knowledge of X) were identical to the cause of X in itself could this gap possibly be closed. What do I mean? Only if idealism were true would one be able to have a knowledge claim. Any discernibility between these causes means not just an epistemic gap, but an ontic one. Since the needed causal equivalence is impossible in all cases except the case of the Prime Cause, then there is necessarily an ontological gap.
Great stuff. thanks. But two key difference from Pittsburg school: 3:22 “thought is always a thought about something so being is what the intellect first conceives there is”. The first phrase is certainly the Pittsburgh school, but it’s second, NOT first, for St Thomas: “what first falls in the intellect is being; second that this being is not that”. 3:50: “something is made available to the intellect independent of it”. Certainly for Thomas and scholasticism, but for McDowell et al, it’s not independent, just distinct. This leads to a very different metaphysics.
Fr Peter Fehlner offers Bonaventure's epistemology as a good medium between Thomas and Kant. I'd really recommend his article on patripassionism and his Theologian of Auschwitz, ch 2.
I think this is one of the most important videos y'all have done so far. This is eye-opening for me, seeing how Kant has been misrepresented. Also, your videos seem to be getting more and more comments! When is Gaven gonna go ahead and publish his dissertation? I need to read that lol. 35:10 Explanation of transcendental idealism. Bookmark: 38:40
Ho God this was no lightweight discussion haha. First of all thank you again, it's worth more than gold. My reading of Kant, and pretty much the one of every professors and thomists I have read, is the first one Gaven was talking about. I will have to jump into the Pittsburg school's Kant. I'm a bit skeptical, but it's worth giving it a fair try. Other from Gaven's article, do you have recommandations of readings for that Pat? Lonergan's insight? I was kind of amazed by Gavin's move to motivate transcendental idealism in a thomistic framework by the agency of the intellect to bring the conceptual episode. Good point, I didn't see it coming. I see how you can still run the realist story by arguing that the content of intuition itself has to be conceptual given intentionality. I
Thanks for inspiring this one! Obviously, I recommend Insight. But perhaps more relevant to this conversation, would be Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense by Henry Allison. Gaven speaks highly of that one.
But if this new Kant interpretation is correct, then why does Kant argues against the possibility of proving the existence of God by saying (if I understood correctly) that it would constitute an illegitimate use of the principle of causality beyong the scope of the phenomenal world ?
I never understood Kant's reasoning about this point, it always seemed to me as an unjustified assumption that Kant made, without good philosophical back-up
Kant's 'object' (in the new, Pittsburg, interpretation) is not Thomas' "being" as the first object of the intellect, because, for Thomas, essential intelligibility was the second object. This difference between act of existence and physical formality gave him a (debatable) way to the non-physical God which seems closed off to the Pittsburg school. Kerr seems to miss this.
Kant has a refutation of idealism while he was an idealist because he was an epistemological idealist, not an ontological one like Berkeley. As a matter of fact he added that refutation in the second edition of the critique of pure reason in order to refute some ontological idealistic interpretation of his thought.
if Thomas was not using a Correspondence Theory of truth then why is intellection not a simple, immediate relation, as per Sellars? Why make the Eureka moment, clarifying something already received (9:00 ff), an exemplar of a stage of the structured intellectual act -- "the mechanism of cognition" (9:33)? I.E.: why did Thomas distinguish the earlier, indeed foundational, stage of the act, that of merely holding the 'species impressa' (the phantasm received from infallible sensation) from the consecutive stage of producing the 'species espressa' (the concept 'in' the possible intellect)?
Sense representation presupposes translation. Why can't the translation process be the Kant's imperatives? In this sense we could have a moderate representational epistemology in the concept of semiotics; sign and signified; or the Icon of Creation pointing toward the Creator. (John of St. Thomas) Thus, to perfect the intellect is to come to understand the Created Order and to Properly Order it (Augustine; Love properly ordered); this is how the saints come to live in the Real World (assuming they do). Note: For Thomism it was the imagination that leaps in and does the work the (active) intellect should be doing; the relationship between the imagination and intellect is interesting (see Part I of Theology and Sanity - Sheed). "The mode of knowing is related to the souls receptivity." - Scholastic dictum (I probably misquoted). We do not talk about receptivity enough in our world; many have a hard time receiving love. Sorry, done with my rambling; I did not think this through; I found my lack of thought ironic in a post on philosophy.
0. Potential = Being 1. Actual = Becoming (actualized) Life eternally actualizes infinite potential, because only Eternity can fully embrace Infinity. The abstract (Heaven) called Love can be expressed concretely (Earth) as a smile, hug, etc., thereby uniting Heaven and Earth. One who knows when to stop is forever safe.
So if i understand... realists say we perceive as it is. Anti-realists say that we can never know true reality and only know an artificial perception. But this view is saying that while our perceptions are not true reality, they at least conceptually mirror true reality because otherwise we would have no basis for the thoughts that we have? And so if i see a tree, the realist would say that tree exists, the anti-realist would say that a blank slate exists but our brain creates the tree, and this position is that some sort of tree-ness exists, from which our brain creates what we perceive as a tree? If i have that right, it seems pretty intuitive and common-sensical.
