Despite the contradictions discovered in the theory of the Critique of Pure Reason, a few Kantian ideas became soon after its publishing philosophical commodities concerning a priori knowledge. First, the need to transform philosophy into a deductive science based on principles, a science that could ground all the other less abstract sciences, like Newtonian physics …
What is matter, and how can we think of matter? ‘Matter’ is not something real in the sense that it can be given in our experience. It is not something that we can feel, touch or see as we see this apple tree or this cat. Matter is an ‘abstraction,’ as they say, or an …
In the overall architecture of being, time adds a new feature of externality to the externality of space: externality as succession. Whereas space was an externality as co-existence, time is an externality in which existing things, external to each other and therefore separated from each other, also succeed each other. This is a different feature …
Whitehead considers that philosophy has a close relationship with religion and science. We could add in this respect that philosophy, like religion, aims at an integration of the individual into the universal. It aims at finding a general scheme of thought that can answer not only to the rational needs of the individual but also …
Usually, when we are discontented with ourselves, we are tempted to think that somehow we are inferior to others. However, it is necessary to consider that there is no inferiority in general, in the same way in which there is no shortness or tallness in general. These are relational concepts. You are either shorter or …
It is important to note in the context of discussing some differences between Hegel’s and Kant’s approach to space that, unlike Kant, Hegel is not much interested in discussing the quality of space, i.e., its relatedness to our intuition or the way we perceive spatiality, but rather in its meaning. As in his general approach, …
It may sound odd to say that matter is the first occurrence of Spirit in the real world because gravity is the most elementary feature of matter. But actually, this is the sense of Hegel’s words when he says: ‘Initially, matter is the form in which the self-externality of nature attains its first being-in-self. It …
While discussing space, Hegel states that the Kantian theory of space – if the subjective idealism of this theory is ignored – is a good explanation of space. And indeed, the way Hegel describes space here is very similar to what Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason says about space. Both philosophers insist on …
The most important aspect of what is called categories is that they are not products of our thought or of reflecting reality, but that we meet them ready-made, as it were. We only become aware of them, and of the fact that they have always been there in our minds, while coping with all kinds …