Kant, Leonard Nelson, Hegel, Prichard and Michael Huemer, the Intuitionists

I have been thinking a little about philosophy. To Prichard and Michael Huemer (the Intuitionists) direct perception of physical reality and of concepts is a fact. What I think they are ignoring is the problem that Kant has with this idea. You see, after reading Hume, Kant accepted that causality is not known by any empirical data. We might see that we hit a ball and it goes flying off many times, but we do not know that one thing causes the other. We just see one event happens after the other. To Kant causality is a priori. This is the quandary that led Kant into a bifurcated version of reality (Things in themselves, and empirical phenomena), because even what we see is not perceived directly. The object we are seeing causes light to be reflected from it and that light causes us to see the object. That even little bit of causality between the object and our senses is what makes even our seeing anything as having a half empirical and half a priori part. (The object causes us to see it). The way Kant bridged this gap between knowledge and objective reality is by combining the senses and structures of the mind based on Aristotelian categories with sense data.-------------- But this solution was rejected by Jacob Fries and Leonard Nelson. To them, there is deeper source of knowledge, intuitive non-immediate knowledge that we know without reasoning and without empirical data. To some degree, this is obvious. Reasoning has to start from somewhere, otherwise you get an infinite regression. But to Fries, this knowledge is imbedded in the human mind. Leonard Nelson, however, understood this knowledge to be axioms that we have to start with in order to be able to reason at all. However, this approach seems to really be Kant’s original assumption because in order to made axioms that make sense, we already have to have some sense of what the outside world is like. ------------------------To Hegel the problem of Kant to get to true knowledge is however solvable, but means of an infinite regression, (if you can get to the end of that regression), i.e., the triads that start in our world and lead up to God, the Infinite Subject. So Hegel agrees with the problem of Kant, and does not try to bypass it by direct knowledge. Rather he goes with this idea of triads, that work from below to get up higher and higher until one reaches God. This process was in fact introduced by Kant and Fichte --that of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis.---------[This approach of Hegel is really the same structure of reality as the Neoplatonic philosopher, Plotinus. The difference is that Plotinus starts from above (The ONE, the Good) and goes down to this world]. --------------------A later note. I would like to argue for H.A. Pricharad and to show why and how he does not ignore Kant's idea that empirical perception is based on causality and even if there is the slightest step of causality, then all our perception has an a priori [non empirical] element. The way to see how Prichard would bypass this difficulty in order to come to the idea that we have direct awareness of objects is this. All our perception is a light and chemical process, not a mind process. the light that is reflected from the body to out eyes to the brain is all direct natural processes. Only once the image is in the brain then does the mind begin to work on it to decipher what it is that we are seeing. So, perception is direct. We do not add causality until we have already perceived the object.----------------------------------The problem in philosophy is that to become a philosopher of note and reputation one needs to disagree with all other philosophers. This is exactly how not to get anything done. to see how things work differently in physics you might notice that the photo electric effect was discovered by someone and then instead of trying to explain it away as contrary to the established way of understanding light to be waves, Einstein went with it an won the noble prize explaining how light comes in discreate particles. Thus, I think that philosophy would do a lot better if one person could learn from the other--and take and good points and discard the invalid ones. For example, I think that Kant was right about most things in philosophy but about little or nothing in moral philosophy of political philosophy. But even his three Critiques needed modification by Jacob fries and Leonard Nelson, mainly because the beginning of reason needs a beginning in axioms, not in Aristotlelean logic. Also, Prichard had some very important points about the very nature o reason itself i.e., that it has only one function. That function has nothing to do with Hume’s idea o perceiving contradictions. Rather, the function of reason is to perceive universals, and that is exactly what Kant talking about when he called this synthetic a-priori. None of this contradicts Hegel’s idea about how reason progress towards the absolute Subject. The problem is that philosophers are so smart that they see contradictions where there are none. Rather they ought to see how to build on each others work.