User talk:Rakivah

I would like to post a question about "John Hick:Hick's Philosophy:Kantian Influences". In that section, the author states that Kant asserted that, in some way, "human minds obscure actual reality in favor of comprehension". This is not my understanding of Kant. The statement is very attractive, but it leaves the reader with the impression that Kant believed that it might be possible for us to perceive "actual reality" if only we tried cleverly enough and persistently enough. This was not Kant's position. He asserted that without the categories, most famously those of space, time, and causality, we would not be able to understand our perceptions at all, leaving us in what William James a hundred years later (referring to infant perceptions) would call "a booming, buzzing confusion". Kant believed that even though we cannot perceive actual reality, we can understand a great deal of it through the operations of reason. For Kant, the outstanding example would be the breakthroughs in the seventeenth century in astronomy culminating in Newton's equations. Since then, human reason has done immeasurably more, but reason itself, in Kant, is limited, largely by those very categories that limit our original untutored perceptions. There are many beautiful and fruitful arguments to be pursued here, but not any that imply what the statement in the article seems to imply.

Now I don't know Hick's philosophy. Perhaps this is his interpretation of Kant, in which case the point should be made more clearly. I am also not an expert on Kant's philosophy, so having anyone comment on what I have written about it would be very welcome. The best argument against me would a quotation or quotations from Kant's work that support the statement in the article. Is there anyone who can help me (and others) on these two points?

The Wikipedia article on Kant has a much better statement of Kant's position, especially the statement, "The external world, he writes, provides those things which we sense. It is our mind, though, that processes this information about the world and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it." Perhaps the most important difference between the two statements and, I think, a crucial point, is that the latter does not attribute a free agency to the mind in perception and understanding without very careful and hopefully precise qualifications. Considering how important Kant still is and how easily learners can come under the control of a wrong idea, I think this is not as minor an issue as it might seem.

I am not sure at this point what the best revision would be or whether the statement is accurate as it stands. I would, as I said, appreciate feedback. Rakivah (talk) 01:02, 13 February 2012 (UTC)