Conte took up the task of developing a systematic kind of business at a time when the smart money was that it was a waste of money,
that science had progressed and applied mathematics and address to the point where the world of thought,
the Enlightenment world knew what it was doing and the metaphysician was actually just troubled themselves.
So the state of metaphysics was something of a wreckage and many of wiser heads thought that it could be safely regarded entirely.
That's how I usually like to begin these lectures with counsel insistence that even as you set out to ignore metaphysics,
you're probably engaged in some form of metaphysical, physical speculation yourself.
He says that the human mind will never give up metaphysical research.
This has little to be expected is that we should prefer to give up breathing altogether to avoid inhaling impure air.
There will therefore always be metaphysics in the world.
Nay, everyone, especially every man of reflection, will have it, and for one, a recognised standard will shape it for himself after his own power.
So you're going to do this whether you like it or not.
And one of the objectives of the committee in the Senate was do it the right way.
Results issued by the Commonwealth are mixed.
Not only mixed, but many regard the project as a dead letter.
Jonathan Bennett in The Philosophical Review.
Some years ago I wrote this Most of the particular reason is prima facie dead because prima facie independent of wholly indefensible theories.
So the commentators dominant problem is to display of life below the surface.
Now, I think that this autopsy report will surely be premature because of the 40 years since Bennett reached that conclusion.
Don't ask how many hundreds and even thousands of dissertations, journal articles,
treatises, presentations from lectures have been addressed to this alleged corpse.
It's a case of mistaken identity, I think.
I think the dead body that it found was a body that he had misidentified but conservationists in his own time.
After the first edition, which came out in 1781,
it was obvious in no time that both friends and critics systematically misunderstood what he was trying to convey.
You are just trying to talk. This is the five minute beginning now.
I have no discipline at all. I can't react to criticism with his characteristic intemperate, frustrated impatience.
He refers to, quote,
incompetent judges who wildly have an old name for every deviation from their perverse though common opinions and never judge of the spirit
of philosophical nobility lecture but cling to the letter only already to put their own conceits in the place of well-defined notions,
and therefore deform and distort them. But his critics didn't have a leg to stand on.
And if you've been waiting for the first picture,
you'll be sympathetic with the frustration of critics who are often not clear as to just what not only what concrete means,
but what the purpose of the entire project is. What is the project of the first chamber?
What's he trying to do? It's not enough about the Arabic to say,
put metaphysics on a scientific foundation because we've yet to define metaphysics or come to some agreement as to what it would mean by scientific,
let alone putting something on a foundation. Ashton Gardiner says this.
This is all by way of encouraging you to approach the book with great optimism, sheer dispersion, Gardiner says.
Virtually every sentence of the critique presents difficulties.
Attempts have been made to provide commentaries comprehensively illuminating, comprehensively illuminating each individual section of the work.
And some of these run to several volumes without getting near its end.
And Schilling. And then one commentator noted what it's like to read the critique of Pure Race and says it is, quote,
a disagreeable task because the words dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions and long winded as well.
Who said that can't emanate from the communists?
This is his reflection on the critique of purism disagreeable task, dry, obscure, post-war, very notions and long winded as well.
So you should be very enthusiastic about taking notes the first from cheap based on his judgements.
Can't go to this. During his credibility, as he was a highly accomplished scholar, his interests were wide ranging.
They included issues in law and in science, and particularly in astronomy.
He is a scholar of consequence and he would have been a notable scholar had he never taken up this project at all.
He gets to it through a rather winding path. A lot of it is hit and miss.
You can tell from the correspondence he has with friends and admirers that he's heading toward the critique of pure reason.
But he's not quite sure what the model should be.
And the best way to get there is he's living in a divided world.
He's living in a world of notes and blog.
That's a world of British empiricism, focussed on observation and measurement,
and a world of traditional rationalist approaches to difficult problems where if you have the right person sitting in the right chair,
you should be able to deduce the facts. And Conte is trying to make that claim and even reconcile those two words.
The first sign of of real progress comes ten years before the first edition of the first ever.
He's writing a letter to Marcus Hurt's former student doctor, an interesting fellow in its own right.
Marcus Hurts, I think,
was the first medical school faculty member to admit and teach Jewish students at a crushing university and hurts himself to a fair amount of writing.
And he was a very loyal, faithful correspondent of accounts,
of deeply interested in contact as a person and in this work and of course was rather self disclosing in his letters to her,
he says to her that he's well, he's he's on to it now.
In 1771, he's working on something he's tentatively titled on the Limits of Sensibility and Reason.
So we can see that this is the forecast of the major workplace.
He describes himself and his approach to these subjects suffering from a mania for Systematising.
You may have noticed those clinical signs that give us some interpretation.
It's a veritable mania for system that if the thing were outlined to any more molecular level, it would be a book about what you see.
And in the German, it's much more outlined. He expresses an urgency in his letters to parents.
He sees time running out. He's still not quite sure how to get this.
Well, what is the question?
The question is how far our knowledge can reach the extent to which we can rely on a census, on the extent to which we can rely on reason.
He recognises that the ultimate arbiter in matters of this kind has always been human rationality,
but no one has taken the time to test the measuring instrument.
That is, the gold standard for whether an argument succeeds or not is rationality itself.
One has to assess the instrument. How good a thermometer is it?
What does its nature bring to the table as it sets about to make judgements about its own productions and conduct?
It is quite original in that regard.
He understands that the census and reason are both limited, but limited to how?
Now what was the project?
If someone were to ask you as one day you will be asked if you're doing philosophy here, it's.
It's one of those easy questions. What was the concept project of the first 40 years?
You have three ideas. What? What what would you say about the project is?
Karl Marx, who is a distinguished scholar,
sees contemporary scholarship as giving us three alternatives and works as a force
for us to develop a systematic metaphysics serving as a reputation of scepticism.
So the great evidence here, of course, is Hill, who awakened Khan from his dogmatic slumber.
And one certainly can read the first four as a sustained defence of our epistemic resources against human type scepticism,
which is the most developed form of what might be called the empiricist path to scepticism now.
What is it about empiricism that that culminates in scepticism and some form of scepticism on the traditional empiricist account?
We do not have direct access to the facts of the external world, and that is we do not experience externality directly, but only immediately.
Not immediately, but immediately. Because between us and the external world are those what do you call them?
Oh, yes, censorious. And so the question is how faithfully they report, what is going on up there?
Well, to raise the question, how faithful is the sensory report of the external world is to assume that you have some reliable,
nonsense, free way of answering that question. That's the box you can't get out of.
And so there is always this gap between reality as it might possibly be known by some nonhuman creature,
and the reality that's empirically sampled by the senses whose limitations and distortions are very well known,
but not perfectly classified or categorised or measured.
So there is that problem. You do the best you can. How good are the senses?
Well, we go to the lunatic back, so they're obviously reporting something reasonably well.
But if you're serious about epistemology, then you have reservations about full knowledge grounded in science experience.
So there's that problem. Call it a lot of problems, but call it a problem like it's it's one of the consequences, certainly, of a radical crisis.
And there are gambits that can be invoked apart from counting information, from adopting a form of realism.
Thomas Reid type of religion, according to which the alleged gap is not a gap at all.
In fact, you see what is there full knowledge of the external world is immediate, not mediated.
And I shall have a few things to say about that. Maybe today.
For some of these lectures? Well,
you might also say that the project of the first critique is to develop a
metaphysical system that will provide the right kind of foundation for science.
And I lean in the direction of kind of attempting to develop an argument that will ground the objectivity of science,
that is to say can't is not trying to redeem the wisdom of the plane that he
recognises the error of is that ordinary thought this problem would be brought.
But he also recognises the profound success of the Newtonian project, the 17th century project, the age of Newfoundland, Galileo coming.
And this surely cannot be based on it. And at the stunningly chancy human tide of the vulnerabilities.
So what Metaphysical Foundation at once respects the achievements of science and provides a
grounding so that science itself understands the basis upon which its claims ultimately depends?
One might argue that that is the project of the first critique.
America gives us a third option, which is the enduring problem philosophy, enduring problem of ontology.
So what is ontology? Well, you all know about elections.
The philosophy students will read on the fine says.
The nice thing about ontology is that it can be defined exhaustively by three monosyllabic English words.
What is there? Well, what is there now?
LOCKE Surely, one of the fathers of modern,
modern day British empiricism was at pains to argue that the endless metaphysical disputes about the real
essence of things were either to begin because we lack the capacity to know the real essence of any.
All we have is what Locke referred to as the nominal essence of things.
It's the way we live in virtual, the way we perceive and cogitate.
It's the way we come to label things. People and carpets and bulbs and computers.
We give things names based on general characteristics.
And it's largely the the shared experiences of a community that settles on the meaning of a term.
As for the realists of things, that's beyond the reach, beyond the reach of our very senses.
How does Locke come to a conclusion like that? Well, he has an older friend of that very clever young fellow, Isaac Watson, that.
And according to Newt, ultimate reality is corpuscular.
That is to say, the ultimate material basis of everything is beyond our visual capabilities.
So the real essence of, you know,
this stuff like spins out of a particular theory of mind that he advances in an essay concerning human understanding of what our ideas.
Ideas are something fabricated out of elementary sensations.
Well, how does that work? Well, elementary sensations are very much like the corpuscular elements of our mind.
Do you see? Now, by a process of association, these elementary sensations are pulled together to form elementary ideas.
And what is that process of association like? It's like gravitational forces that fall together cause for more complex bodies.
So Bloch has already given us something of an Italian theory of mind.
And on that account, of course, we can know the real essence.
No, no. Even above can of the real essence of things.
The real essence of things is something very small.
But that's another level at which we examine things.
We examine this. And at this level, we give things names based on what?
Based on the use we make and the traffic that we have with them in actual.
But. Well, this then does create something of a pathological problem.
The problem is. All right, we've got these phenomenal essences, these things we've given names to.
But what really is there and in case you're hearing something about that squeak of candy and nobody's speaking at this point,
your your hearing, you're hearing, actually.
But there is an aspect of reality which is inferred but not know.
And the condition of numenor are not entirely removed from the loftiest real essences.
I can almost hear Costco screaming, just like they usually take something from that.
Now, Karl Emmerich's argues that Congress aware of all three of these issues,
but he finally settled on a modest fourth option, which once referred to as the transcendental option,
but would unearth and delineate the conditions necessary for both the scientific and the manifest images of the world of the transcendental option.
I will get your content and his neo logistic use of transcendental.
Place. Well,
Kurt says this is a beachhead when one's region has learned completely to understand
its own power in respect of objects which can be presented to it in experience,
it should easily be able to determine what completeness and certainty the extent
and the limits of its intended employment beyond the bounds of experience.
Once reason sees what it is doing would be inferred.
If I could use that horror like it's because it was so difficult to turn off today and to start talking about it, which I'm sure it is.
And he stopped me before I said again, yes, for once.
What's reason has a way of reckoning. What it does with the contents of experience.
How it works on the contents of experience. Half the model is taken care of already.
And this is why we need a lot of critical assessment of how the reason operates, what its limits, what its limits are.
Contra raises a very interesting question, which I think is probably the best way to the first chief.
He raises the question and they throw the gun. The question is, how is nature possible?
How is nature possible? Think about this.
He defines nature as the existence of things so far as it is determined according to universal laws.
So what is he getting out of this book?
here.We said, Well, you set a standard. Here we stand and sit.
In a veritable hurricane. Of stimulation.
Showers of quantum. Sounds, which if you were very attentive, you would begin to hear, listen, say things you touch.
Surfaces that you think are hard. So they're not.
Well, they're hard. They're not what you think. You've got this tremendous balance of stimulation disconnected.
How bad is it? Well, the olfactory epithelial cells of the canines will respond to the dissipation of one molecule of fatty acid.
You see? This is why Marcus detects Odysseus the minute he gets within smelling rage.
There's Odysseus pretending to be me and I just go to spots.
And after all these years of dogs, I mean, there's the very fact of Odysseus, the survival shots.
And I'm so. So August picks up the smell, your dogs pick you up.
Maybe it's sort of a mile away without you say.
The best studies of energy at the threshold of human vision indicates that if we can successfully get two or three quanta to a retinal cone,
it will excite the visual response.
You generally have to bang the cornea with about 150 of them because half of what arrives in the cornea is reflected back.
And then this more reflection of the anterior surface of the lens, etc., etc.
But if you can get a few to the retina, you'll excite a visual response.
Audition is sensitive at the level of Brownian motion.
If you haven't done them in physics, may I say to you that is a very low bar,
since most of you are blowing out your own internal mechanism with what you refer to as music.
You don't have to worry about hearing anything above the level of Brownian motion.
You'll be lucky if you hear a streetcar come down on it.
But the auditory system is that when you see the problem, don't you?
You've got all that going on and hitting the system that's responsive to just about everything.
How out of that morass do you get tables and chairs and people and symphonies
and rules and law and trees and agricultural principles and shipping vessels,
etc. How do you get the law governed world of science?
Given that that rash, that epidemic of sensory experience is what makes that possible and can't
satisfied that empiricism doesn't even have a way of addressing the question,
let alone selling the human being as a passive recipient to these tidal waves of stimulation.
What, in the words of Sir Thomas Brown in religion?
It's a wonderful passage in religio literature where Thomas Brown refers to one as Stella, the boat with a gross thrust just sitting.
Well, we'd go through life staring about to the grocery store stage.
What was that? What was that? Oh, what was that as opposed to.
The Lunar Excursion model. And coming back to Earth.
Orbiting the moon, etc.
How is all that possible charges going to argue that all that is possible because of what we bring to this otherwise tidal wave of stimulations.
The order that we impose on is that the knowledge we have, in fact,
is a reflection of the very rational and perceptual principles that operate as we confront the world.
Now you say to yourself, Well, for goodness sake, what's new with that?
Here's what's wrong with that.
Anyone taking the that part of the empiricist story, according to which our knowledge of the external world is never immediate,
but immediate, recognises that we are imposing some kind of effect on whatever it is that gets to us.
That old act. Memo to scan submission all agents over now.
No one ever steps into the same river twice. Everything's in flux to see.
The trick that Comcast pull off is how to save.
In light of all that. How to say what I prefer to think of as the scientific image from Reich's objectivity.
That's the burdensome part of the task to acknowledge what we are doing by way of constructing a lawful reality.
And at the same time saving the resulting image from, as I say, rank, subjectivity.
So he wants to save philosophy from something else.
Next week I shall go into a little more detail and a number of scholars have wondered why can't is so harsh
and the propaganda and his treatment of the Scottish gun since the school of read Oswald Beijing and others.
And I think Manfred Kean has has the right answer to that.
Count as part of a war within German philosophy.
It has to ask of us. It was there before Thomas was even a student, and the war was between those who would make philosophy in a systematic,
scientific and that sense of systematic subject,
and those who would attempt to reconcile philosophy to the ordinary understandings of the ordinary person.
Indeed, reconcile philosophy to the claims of religion in such a way as to appeal to persons full of narrow perception judgement.
This gives rise really to two rather than distinct schools of philosophy within the German intellectual world.
The sure philosophy, which is the academic philosophy that confirms all of this life and the popular philosophy which is,
as the term suggests, something much more accessible to ordinary sensibilities.
Can't, I think, have the Scottish Common sense as so close to the popular philosophy as to put some distance between it?
So this is the only explanation for the rather trivial reference to read Passport and
Beat because of this much encouraged that is redolent of reading commonsense philosophy.
So a few words about Reid. If Thomas Reid were alive and thriving, well, he would be stronger today because he was 54 years old before his first book.
Which means he will have been let go about 25 years before he had any occasion to write it.
He wasn't a prophet. He was carefully thought out, probably the scientifically most prepared mind of the period.
He knew the math intuitively. He was an expert in geometry and was an expert in going about it.
We discovered long ago. I think the first paper that I published I read was 1978, and good scholars would look you in the eye and say, Thomas School.
Well, that's no longer the case and creates inquiry into the human mind as a book you can take to the beach.
You will enjoy it. It's well-written. It's humorous places.
Reid's concern is that philosophical scepticism will create a refuge out of philosophy.
And so he's particularly concerned with the influence that children's philosophy is likely to have.
Not because it startles, but because it makes virtually no contact with the successful dimensions of life.
That is to say,
everything about which HUME raises a sceptical challenge is something that must be taken for granted in all of the ordinary experience of life.
And Reid works HUME against himself in this regard.
If you read human causality in the Trees and mind you, if HUME awakened because it wasn't a treatise,
because all the treatise comes before the end of the treatise was not available in which an object can't read Hume's inquiry,
but not the treatise, which I think is one of the reasons why he never got caught up in the personal identity issue,
which is so fully explored in the treatise.
Not so much at all really important, but what is it?
What is he talking for regarding causality?
HUME gives us the the simplest stuff that I see before me on a venue table.
Two balls, one moves, it hits the other, the other moves.
What? I must own myself. I cannot see some third term way to explain.
Ball one. Holmes It's ball to all two.
What is it that you can see between those events?
He can see, of course. He had.
See, of course. So where is causality? Causality isn't on the billiard table.
Causality is a habit of the mind fabricated out of repeated experiences.
Thus, whenever two events are constantly conjoined in experience, it becomes habitual for us to assume that one causally brings about the other.
And since this is an habitual feature of our own mental machinery, which after all, could be other than what it is.
Hillary chose the rather startling conclusion, quote, that anything may be the cause of anything.
That is, you could reconstitute sentient life in such a way that the causal connections would be understood in radically different ways.
This just happens to be the way we do it.
And then the field assures us that, of course, when he leaves the privacy of his study and goes out into the light of day,
he thinks the way ordinary people think that this is a philosophical insight on his part.
Reid has a bit of fun with that, he says.
So you see that Mr. Hill's philosophy is very much like a hobbyhorse which Amanda is ill, can keep home with him and ride to this contentment.
But just in case he should bring it into the marketplace,
his friends will quickly come a the jury and confiscate his estates and have the solicitude solicitor never and the law.
Now what Reid wants to make clear is that there are certain first principles.
On which all four ends.
These are principles of common sense, he says, which we are under an obligation to take for granted in all of the ordinary affairs of life.
Quote Even the lowly caterpillar will crawl across a thousand leaves until it finds the one that's right for its dying.
It does not do this by way of metaphysical speculation.
In fact, 99 times in 100, the most decisive moves we make, the initiatives we take are known deliberately.
You will not be deliberating the movements associated with riding a bike, getting a forkful of something into your mouth, picking up the phone.
But it's not just the picking up of the phone.
It's understanding that whatever laws were operating that gave the telephone weight yesterday are still operating.
Do you see that? The laws?
Well, we didn't know about internal combustion engines, but but if you go out in the morning and the car doesn't start your first all this stuff.
My goodness. They've suspended the laws of the internal combustion.
No, you're you're forced to stop because there's something wrong with the car and that assumption.
It's not something that you sort of grudgingly reach on the basis of.
It is a necessary part of functioning. You might see this as almost a kind of pre Darwinian insight into what it is.
Creatures of a given time and a given nature must take for granted to get across the street.
Now, what Reed wants to argue is that a philosophy that officially opposes this, that holds up before a rational thing,
the spectacle of its most basic conceptions being fatally philosophically flawed is a philosophy that's going to have a very, very brief shelf life.
People will look at it and they'll smile at the clever person who advanced it, and then they will get on with the business of life.
But reading the principles of common sense have a kind of cousin ship with some of the apparatus that you will see
culture developing under the pure categories of the understanding and under the core principles of perception.
So that's sort of a rather long winded way of saying that there are some reading and anticipations of the cards.
And then the question is, since can't an English dictionary read and I do want to say the account, by the way,
took some pride in the fact that his ancestry was Scottish, that the name itself is a corruption Scottish name.
And we know how avidly he pursued the productions of the Scottish school because
these in redacted form were being made available on German translations very,
very quickly. Scottish philosophical thought was not remote from the German speaking world of a number of years, many years ago.
Oh my gosh. One of my students was going to do a PhD in Berlin.
And as we always have, our students will say.
Professor, is there anything I can do for you while I'm in Germany?
You've done so much for me. You should write that down.
I said I read it. Yes.
See if you can find a German translation of rates inquiry that might have been available before Conte wrote the first edition of the first party.
And damned if it wasn't for. It's the worst thing.
It was anonymously published wisely by the church.
It's a horrible translation. And although the timing of that.
All right, I have no reason to believe can't ever go forward with this common sense and surrender as.
Galina mentioned that she found, you know,
a all of that and may be comfortable with this because he intends to get in read Oswald Beatty as if as if what they came up with would serve.
As a criticism of Hume's sophisticated philosophy.
He says. What does the common sense school do other than consult for the wisdom of a herd?
But you see the common sense school is not concerned. It's not insulting the wisdom of the herd.
It's not what everyone stands up and applauds. It's not what everyone claims.
Classroom. So it's what every one of us is under an obligation to take for granted.
You can't prove the law of contradiction, for example, because all proof presupposes the validity of the law.
You get that right? Well, this is exactly what Richard is going to do with the principles of common sense.
Every moment of verification that you would seem to employ is an attempt to vindicate these principles presupposes their validity.
And this guy's very close to a common, transcendental argument, a necessary condition for something else to be etched.
There's one more feature of the project that I want to bring to your attention.
Before going into the details of what he means by a transcendental argument.
Com very often takes recourse to legal force.
He speaks of a fair minded judge.
He speaks of the kind of evidence that would prevail upon the judgement of the grand jury.
He wants his arguments to be understood not as arguments in formal logic,
but arguments in a transcendental logic by which he means an evidentiary form of argument.
Given the fact what get given this is the case, what are the necessary conditions absent which this couldn't possibly make the case?
Now, we do know that the Court early on, I mentioned to you at the beginning of the lecture that his interests reached law and politics.
Total Contra was quite interested in in legal cases involving boundary disputes and law.
These are often referred to in the papers that will be filed on behalf of the boundary dispute,
would be referred to as the double seal of certain deductions.
Correct. And to some extent, course of argument as a species of deduction system where you show the the pedigree of property claims,
the pedigree of cognitive claims,
how far back you can take them, what what conditions they satisfy, what is made possible by the fact that they are in place.
And I think it would be well-served reading the first 20 as if it was something of a brief of something
of a legal brief and in place of something of a brief proposal of an oral and oral argument.
Well, is he just another dead Prussian philosophy of this is what we find?
In a contemporary journal, a leading journal in physics wrote.
In physics, it became quite clear in the last 30 years how the cognition of objects can be carried through.
Surprisingly,
the strategy which was applied in physics for the cognition of objects follows essentially in the conceptual program formulated by count,
even if the majority of physicists is not aware of this point.
So I say this is not not only in my judgement, Jonathan Bennett, this identified the body.
Not only is the body not dead, but in some fields the body is is very much, very much a lot of.
What shall we say about the overall and.
Well, I'm going to get a little tough now. I mean, this is over, Mr. Clarke controversy split the royalties with me.
But I do want to say this. But first, contrary to a rumour that got started here four or five years ago, I am not a content.
Of. I died in 322 B.C. with my friend Aristotle.
We think the whole town like to move down here a sense of.
But could that possibly be a more consequential philosophical project?
A project that respects the perceptual and cognitive resources that we bring to bear on every knowledge claim we make.
And at the same time does not lapse into a kind of psychology.
It's a metaphysical analysis that I say respects the stamp of human cognition on all of its works but does not collapse into subjectivity.
A metaphysical project that would inform all the sciences of just what it is that makes some of their
undertakings necessarily successful in virtue of the manner in which we do carbonised reality.
Oh, I'm going to leave you with a B in the garden so that you understand that it is possible
to maintain objectivity while respecting the perceptual uniqueness of the recipient.
Well, I got to go. That's all right, Cesar.
I like the yellow roses.
We have yellow roses, and they both beautiful.
I don't do this alone because there's invariably a honey and my arrival doing something with this thing.
Rose. As it happens, the peak spectral sensitivity of the normal human visual system.
Is 5500 angstroms 550 billion microns.
You will call that? Yeah. The peak sensitivity in the visual system of the honeybee is in the ultraviolet.
So the honeybee doesn't see anything else. And I don't see anything ultraviolet.
All the girls are victims of some sort of hallucination, though.
And once we start wading through council documents, we will see the manner in which the unique perceptual and cognitive principles we bring to bear
on the situation can preserve the objectivity of the knowledge we claim about that situation,
even while granting that what we are bringing to bear is distinctly human.
Coming to. Well, then I shall see.