Astral Codex Ten

Kant

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Kant

Article

Kant is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 15, 2021 and July 15, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Kant, remember, said that we have no”; “Kant, remember, said that we have no idea what actual reality is”; “he did beat out Kant for a big philosophy prize”. It most often appears alongside Darwin, Harvard, India.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: July 15, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
Here Watters is working off a theory, sometimes raised by psychiatrists and medical historians, that I think of as a kind of Kantian perspective on mental illness. Kant, remember, said that we have no idea what actual reality is; we see reality through the filter of our own preconceived notions and mental categories, and although there is an external world, we shouldn't claim to know very much about it. In the same way, Watters suggests, there probably is some base-level objectively-real mental illness. If you have to think of it as something, you can think of it as formless extreme stress, looking for an outlet. But the particular way the stress finds an outlet is based on the patient's cultural preconceptions. If you believe that stressed people go blind, you'll go blind. If you believe that stress people act possessed by demons, you'll act possessed by demons. And if you believe that stressed people become obsessed with being really thin and starve themselves, you might become obsessed with being really thin and starve yourself. A few people will have some natural tendency towards one outlet or another - there are a tiny handful of anorexics even in societies like pre-1990 Hong Kong that don't recognize anorexia, just as there are a few modern Westerners who still act possessed by demons. But unless you're especially predisposed towards some method or another, your stress will take the outlet already worn to a deep groove by your cultural milieu.
Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Moses Mendelssohn was a philosopher called the "father of the Haskala" or Jewish enlightenment. I don't know how impressive he was as a philosopher, but he did beat out Kant for a big philosophy prize. Also, Kant was quoted as saying "Mendelssohn is an awesome-cool philosopher".
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
This was never stated outright, certainly not in the helpful summary sections, but I felt it, particularly in the first of the three sections. It was expressed more in the narrative sections – in the bits where, instead of firmly stating hypotheses and marshalling arguments, Haidt allowed himself a bit more of a classic pop-sci writing style, linking together the development of his views with autobiography, and expressing frustration with the shortcomings of his chosen foils, most notably Kant, Bentham, and Kohlberg.
When he slams Kant and Bentham in a really silly bit of the book where he goes on a tangent about how they were autistic (complete with a really laughable graphic that adds nothing to the text), he slams them for “reducing” morality to just one thing. When he belabours a metaphor about taste receptors, he very much seems to be analogising to normative morality, not psychological description. When he describes his time in India and the affect it had on his approach to morality, he’s seemingly talking about normative morality, not descriptions of how intuition works or where it comes from.
Similarly, when firmly in moral psychology territory, the first section on intuitionism is, if something that’s very much “in the water” in many communities by now, still lacks the mainstream acceptance it deserves. If you can ignore the odd attempts to cast it as an enemy of or even alternative to both Kantian deontology and utilitarianism, and skip entirely the bit about how Jeremy Bentham was autistic or something, and treat it just as psychology unmoored from normative morality, it’s great stuff.