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I read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in my undergraduate ethics class, and that was tough to read 200 years after it was written. He takes it

I read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in my undergraduate ethics class, and that was tough to read 200 years after it was written. He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it.

woodruffw 3y ago
> He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it. I don't think this is true, at least with respect to the last ~80 years of the philosophy of science: the current "central dogma" of scientific inquiry is that all inferences must be falsifiable in order to be scientific. In other words: good science generates inductive and parsimonious explanations, not universal rules. To be universal would be to discharge falsifiability. Edit: For what it's worth, I think Kant's contemporaries also found him ponderous and difficult to read.
cmehdy 3y ago
Science doesn't determine the rules of the universe, it generates models with predictive power within a domain of validity
wk_end 3y ago
For what it's worth, the distance of time isn't the only thing that makes Kant difficult to read. There's also the distance of language - translation is almost inevitably going to blur the original lines of the original (I've heard it said, not of Kant but of Heidegger, that it's easier to learn German and read Sein und Zeit than it is to read Being and Time). And to make matters worse, Kant has always been criticized as a notoriously poor writer, even by his contemporaries. (And there's the underlying complexity of his thought, of course.)
- shanusmagnus 3y ago
  Having made the attempt at Being and Time in English, I find the assertion unironically plausible, even likely.
- jq-r 3y ago
  What also doesn't help is that Kant had a gigantic ego so never bothered to make his writing better with time.
Barrin92 3y ago
> that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, we indeed cannot do this and Feynman illustrated this frequently using the analogy of chess (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4). As Kant argues we can never observe the rules of the physical world as things in themselves, just as we can't directly look at the rules of chess by observing games. We can only get individual hints that we piece together into models of the world in ways we can understand.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  It still seems like we can figure out the rules of chess better by observing many games than by sitting down and reasoning about what the rules of a tactics game played on an 8x8 grid would be; sure we'd miss uncommon moves like under-promotion and en passant until we had a very large sample, but to me the chess analogy is an argument for empiricism, not against it.

woodruffw 3y ago

> He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it. I don't think this is true, at least with respect to the last ~80 years of the philosophy of science: the current "central dogma" of scientific inquiry is that all inferences must be falsifiable in order to be scientific. In other words: good science generates inductive and parsimonious explanations, not universal rules. To be universal would be to discharge falsifiability. Edit: For what it's worth, I think Kant's contemporaries also found him ponderous and difficult to read.

cmehdy 3y ago

Science doesn't determine the rules of the universe, it generates models with predictive power within a domain of validity

wk_end 3y ago

For what it's worth, the distance of time isn't the only thing that makes Kant difficult to read. There's also the distance of language - translation is almost inevitably going to blur the original lines of the original (I've heard it said, not of Kant but of Heidegger, that it's easier to learn German and read Sein und Zeit than it is to read Being and Time). And to make matters worse, Kant has always been criticized as a notoriously poor writer, even by his contemporaries. (And there's the underlying complexity of his thought, of course.)

shanusmagnus 3y ago
Having made the attempt at Being and Time in English, I find the assertion unironically plausible, even likely.
jq-r 3y ago
What also doesn't help is that Kant had a gigantic ego so never bothered to make his writing better with time.

Barrin92 3y ago

> that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, we indeed cannot do this and Feynman illustrated this frequently using the analogy of chess (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4). As Kant argues we can never observe the rules of the physical world as things in themselves, just as we can't directly look at the rules of chess by observing games. We can only get individual hints that we piece together into models of the world in ways we can understand.

aidenn0 3y ago
It still seems like we can figure out the rules of chess better by observing many games than by sitting down and reasoning about what the rules of a tactics game played on an 8x8 grid would be; sure we'd miss uncommon moves like under-promotion and en passant until we had a very large sample, but to me the chess analogy is an argument for empiricism, not against it.