Theme 1 reflections(After)

This week we had the theme about knowledge.

“What is knowledge”? If I did not read the preface to the second edition of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”, my answer should be “knowledge is the experiences”. But after the lecture and seminar, I think my answer is not correct. Since different people have different experiences, it is hard to say which experience is true. So now I think “knowledge” should be the correct way of understanding the world.

I don't know if my current answer is correct or not. But I have tried my best to learn something this week.

Kant’s thinking can be summarized into one sentence.

Let us assume that objects must conform to our cognition instead of our cognition conform to objects.

I think it means our cognition is the rule of how we understand the world. A red apple for example, this physical object is existed because we have perceived it. It is red because we have the knowledge of what red is. We have got some knowledge before and we just remind them for get new knowledge: apple is red. This is how we gain knowledge by using our cognition.

In “Critique of Pure Reason”, Kant defined the faculties of knowledge:

The time and space.

The categories of understanding.

I think our cognition is the way of using these faculties to define objects.

I have also learned something about time. In the seminar, I have understood that “we are the time”. The production of animation is a good explanation. The animation has the time line, for each frame, a picture will be added. The frame is the current time point, just like “now”. But only one frame cannot become an animation as same as we cannot even hear a complete words without the time line. But we are able to hold the time points in the past and in the future, that’s why “we are the time”.

In the seminar we also discussed Socrates’s argues: it is better to use “through” instead of “use”.

I think my opinion before is correct. Our organs such as ears and eyes are just tools for perceive. They cannot help us know the objects. I remembered the sentence” the perception without the conception is blind, and the conception without the perception is empty”. This can be considered as a born blind man will never know what color means as same as the newborn baby.

The blind man has no perception and newborn baby has no conception.