Why knowledge has to be of independent things, things independent of the mind according to H.A. Prichard? The answer: According to the philosopher H.A. Prichard, knowledge requires the object to be entirely mind-independent because the mind's state affects the nature of its presentations. If the object of knowledge were influenced by the mind, it would not be truly known but would instead be a product of the mind's modification, similar to an appearance or an illusion rather than a thing-in-itself. Therefore, for something to be known, it must be something that the mind does not alter in any way; its object must be wholly external to the mind. I think that Quantum Mechanics does not change this fact because if you do the two-slit experiment, the result does not change according to how you think. If you open one slit, the light beam acts as individual photons. If you open two slits, the light beam acts as waves and there is constructive and destructive interference. This goes against German Idealism and Kant in particular. I appreciate Kant an and Friesian school very much that built that system based on the limits of reason, but I think to make knowledge something that affects what it knows means that it knows nothing. I would like to mention here that when Physics says that a nature of light depends on how it is observed does not mean that it is subjective, but rather it means how it is measured.------I asked Dr. Kelley Ross about this.[Dr. Ross is a main representative of the Friesian School who holds knowledge has to be filtered through structures in the Mind.] His answer is: But I'm not sure what anyone means when they say that something is known by "reason." This cannot mean known by means of deduction or rational inference, because that relies on pemises. To Aristotle, premises that are first principles are not known by "reason" (logos) but by "mind" (nous). This means they are self-evident. I don't see how anyone has ever improved on that, except to falsify the self-evidence of such principles, which the Rationalists unintentionally accomplished.----Plato's equivalent are not self-evident. We are not even initially aware of them. Fries and Nelson say they are known by "reason," but, again, I'm not sure what this even means, except that they asume that it comes from a "faculty" of "reason," whose nature is speculative. Otherise, the theory of "non-intuitive" knowledge is the functional equivalent of Platonic Recollection. For Plato, phenomenal objects "participate" in the Forms, without any explanation of how that works.--- With Fries, we can say that the Forms are in the objects, but non-intuitively. The Forms are Kantian things-in-themselves, but things-in-themselves are, as it says, in themselves. As Paul says: Through a glass darkly. We might say Kant has a version of this: The synthesis of the categories that produces phenomena, also introduces the Moral Law, which is all that is left for Kant of Plato's Forms. Kant says we know the Moral Law through "reason," but this suffers from the same difficulties as any other reference to "reason," and Kant's "reason" in particular underdetermines all the moral content that Kant wants to get out of it.----- That is the end of the reply of Dr. Ross. I might add here that causality to Kant is a priori (as shown by Hume)-and so even physical observation of an object requires an a priori assumption-i.e the assumption that something is causing me to see the object. The knowledge itself that I am seeing something is not contained in the light rays.-- I would also like to add that Dr Ross points out that no one has a better answer about the nature of reason--it is a simple that has a function, but we do not know what its essense is. [The difference between the approach of Kant and Fries and the approach of GE Moore and Prichard is important even though they are close as noted by philosophers in the 1800's who were aware of Jacob Fries and yet were edging towards the approaches that became the analytic schools of Russel and GE Moore.] Robert Hanna deals with the problems of Analytic Philosophy and holds that Kant addresses all the same issues in a better way.]