So last week I gave you class two supreme principles.
And I want to begin today's lecture with the supreme principle in relation to the understanding that this is a good starting point.
The issue before us today, which was the sympathetic unity of perception.
It's a very difficult part. The first all always systematically exploring the supreme principle in relation to understanding is to quote Walcott.
First of all, the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original, the unity of perception.
That's one of those wonderful passages in the first take that has eyes for all of people reading the second and third time consultative,
consultative chapter meetings and just trying to get through it.
But he does lay out the argument that clarifies what he means by this,
and he attach central importance to what is claimed regarding this particular section.
In fact, he goes so far as to say that the synthetic unity of perception is, quote,
the highest point to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding.
It's the pinnacle. I continue with the quote, even the whole of logic and conformable there with transcendental philosophy itself.
The quote continues. Indeed, this faculty of perception is the understanding itself.
You'll find that the 134.
So how does it wish to have this synthetic ending understood?
It's not subjective. It's not some psychological state of consciousness.
The synthetic unity of consciousness is an objective condition of all knowledge.
It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing the object,
but as a condition under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me.
Now this is addressed to the question of how various sensations become integrated and unified in consciousness,
and then how it is that it interferes in my or your consciousness and how all of
this should be understood as distinct from mere subjective or psychological states.
Well, step back for a moment and consider what has been established so far.
If there are to be concepts of law, there must be some means by which to fashion out of representations.
Thus, some sort of categorical framework is necessary if engineers are to be colonised as objects at all.
Cons table of categories therefore must match up with the properties that enter into anything standing interest, subjectively stable IDs,
things that are universally agreed to by participants of a certain kind,
or it's only by way of these categories that objects can be conceptualised at all.
And recall that additional resources are required if there is to be knowledge for understanding is grounded in rules and in an inexact blockchain,
but benefits from practice, but is at best a gift of.
Mother. Mother wish. Yes. She is back.
Well, so far so good. But just one.
This seems to be the last word.
As progress is tracked from sensation to objective knowledge, something new and seemingly a psychological entrance into the equation.
If there are to be concepts at all,
namely our perception and its shadowy relationships which can't identify us as the empirical ego, a transcendental ego and a self.
This matter of cells has has whiskers, as Professor Williams was among the first to remind all of us a few years ago.
We can go back, certainly to the ship of Theseus.
I don't know whether you are in the mood for legend in this kind of weather.
Particularly legends draw from the sunny isles of the Mediterranean on the Mediterranean coast.
But this is the one who was sent to create to liberate the Fenians from a burden that had been imposed by King Midas.
And that for him was Syracuse sacrificing Athenian youth to the Tang.
By putting them in the pit of a labyrinth, they would be devoured by a minute.
So Theseus had to go off and do something about this. You know the story he gets there minus his daughter falls in love with him.
She shows him the best way to get out of Survivor.
And just in case he's successful in getting down to the middle or killing the off and then has to get out.
She gives him a gold thread that he can lay behind him as he works his way through this maze like structure.
And then all he has to do is follow that thread. Some of you will recall that in Plato's Republic that we are as puppets on the string.
We are acting upon by the gods in ways we cannot fathom.
But there is one strength we can pull back on, which is the golden thread of reason.
And this, of course, is a loss on the back of that myth.
It must be. So he does he say he even promises to talk to me, to Ariadne and take her back to the Greek mainland.
He says, I shall chew on all this.
Wait for me. Think of that. You know, the reality of nuptials is supposed to be picked up and to abandon.
So there's a myth surrounding that. Julian is a great, great hero.
He's done heroic deeds and therefore the gods need a special place for it.
According to one myth, he is installed eternally in the heavens, where he sits on the stool of oblivion.
So that he has a kind of immortality that can quite figure out how it was he had got so crazy.
Priest.
Now the debate begins because as a space ship goes from Ireland to Ireland to a place and port to port, celebrated its triumph year in and year out.
Pretty soon the ship's old boards have to be replaced by new boards.
You see where this is going and what at what point have you so replaced the original boards that it really isn't the ship of Theseus any longer?
Or if you had all of those old boards on a pile and constituted yet another ship out of them, would you now have to?
The original of the original in some sense had disappeared and now has reappeared.
And before you know it, the philosophers are just mucking up all this.
Otherwise, a very good story. And there's a story that we get bumped up to the minute we begin to consider ourselves,
because even in your tragic youth, you have a bunch of old cells that are being replaced, even as you sit here.
Your tastebuds are going to be all brand new in less than a week.
How on earth do you remember what a fat dog tasted like?
Do you see that sort of thing? It's all brand new.
I don't want you to smile, but when Mommy tries to front you by saying that, you'll lose your taste for food.
So, Mommy, those bugs are replaced all the time. You just have to have a pause between saying so.
With the body that's constantly undergoing change, the question arises How is there a continuity of self?
Continuity of the ego? Does the scholastic philosopher's work more or less to interpret following either Plato or Aristotle on this?
But there is an essential self that is an essential thing that undergoes alteration but not change.
But unless there is some enduring substance that just is so, there really wouldn't be anything for the engines of change to be working on and so on.
Essentialism comes out of this when Aristotle says famously, that's the sense in which risk is musical.
It's different in the sense in which wiskus as a man,
he's pointing to the difference between some accidental properties that we
acquire over the course of a lifetime and some essential properties in virtual,
which we all have the kinds of things that we are.
The medieval part of the story? Well, the scholastic part of the story is itself a very interesting part of the story.
But we've got to move on, rather. And we moved to lock.
So when you read Locke's essay concerning the human understanding and I'm told in 40.
Secondary sources that this is his broadside against Descartes theory of innate ideas.
Keep two things in mind the theory of the neat ideas ascribed to Descartes.
Descartes publicly denied in French.
He never attached himself to any such notion as that.
And secondly, Descartes was discussed by law.
So we have every reason to believe that during this period of self-exile, Locke should read what Descartes had to say.
Believe is the right target. Here is probably the Cambridge playlist showing more of than day.
And the Cambridge Platonist Scott Cudworth,
Warren Carnegie were actually gainfully employed in reviving Platonist thought in philosophy and the Anglophone very much,
very much in opposition to the sorts of things that we would identify with what they call the Newtonian perspective on reality and knowledge.
So so Locke has a project when it comes to this,
and the project is going that at a certain point will focus on this notion of a substantial or essential self.
And the essence is more generally. And that's when we fell in love,
declaring that you must make a distinction between real essences and a novel that says you don't know the real essence of anything.
The real essence is going to be at some Newtonian corpuscular level to which you do not have perceptual access.
And as far as novelists go, these are entirely the gift of convention.
But one chooses to call this tissue is is a is a fact that arises in a given cultural context, historical context.
We can imagine cultures and settings and people and languages where whatever it is we're trying to get
out of the word tissue would not be what they were trying to get out of an entirely different word.
As a lot of points out, it could constitute something physically indistinguishable from life, much cleverer than a clock.
And you might go about describing that entropy in terms quite different from the ones you would use for a block.
And to illustrate the point, he gives us the famous instance of the prince and the cobbler.
What, after all, goes into once so full of personal identity, continuing ego, etc.
Well, simply, all of the things present in your consciousness.
And since nothing is now present in your consciousness, is actually based on something happening now.
We can say that consciousness is just the repository of all of the things that
you remember from milliseconds ago to hours and days and years and months ago.
Well, do this as an experiment on a given night, a prince at a cobbler, go to sleep.
In the course of the contents of Prince's consciousness are transferred to the cobbler.
The contents of the cobblers consciousness are transferred to the prince.
And what says I persuasively touch on that on there arising I grant you quote They are the same man, but not the same person.
And you, you, you. Here's this shoe cobbler who expects you to be very generous in his presence about this great thing and that princely fellow,
you know, to be the prince wants to know if you need a new pair of heels.
As far as I'm concerned, that's in the context of consciousness exhaust.
So. So we are fortunate always.
By the way, it's one of the great tragedies today that we don't have this group around.
You always need acute philosophers to keep your thinking clear and challenged,
and you always need great wits to reign in the pretensions of philosophy.
Unfortunately, in the late 17th and early 18th century,
the English speaking world did have great wits and they had a lot of fun because of what science and philosophy have been producing in recent years.
I actually thought the ones I was thinking about formed a club.
They knew each other. They formed a club named after Doctor Scribblers.
How many of you have ever read the Memoirs of My Teens?
Screw the last. Who wrote guest memoirs.
John Arthur. Do you not know that? Do you know the name of the club they formed?
The script language and the script.
Libyans had a field day. It was like co-productions with the Royal Society.
John was famous as well on this business of the Prince and how you can get away with, you know, the next Sanskrit, Clarence.
Switch. Oh. Ringing bells, then.
They look, touch? What are they? What are they trying to do?
A little plot. This is a scientific community. They are trying to get sunshine from cucumbers.
They're persuaded that if the authorities will give them just more funding.
They might be able to produce so much stuff as to sell it cheaply.
You get the picture. There's a wonderful book by Christopher Fox, which I'd recommend you called Luck and the Script, Larry.
It's a good summary, particularly if you're a philosophy student.
You might get quite a bit. They do a lot of metaphysics and will offer you a little chat.
But for the first serious for the song sheet of the thesis, we turn to George Berkeley.
And to Barclay's Alison from. And Barclays also from along with Thomas Ridge inquiry put to the test the notion that we have exhausted this concept
of an enduring self by consulting no more than what the empiricists offer by way of the contents of consciousness.
The argument is fairly straightforward. It's sometimes called the brave officer argument, and the brave officer argument is the following for.
Imagine a brave officer call him big, who recalls vividly having been a boy once punished for stealing fruit from the orchard.
Call the young boy. Now consider many years hence a decorated show.
Reflecting on the day he was decorated as a young officer.
Call the agent general. See?
Who has a vivid recollection of seeing the Oval Office baby and no recollection whatsoever of being the boy on the Lockheed account.
It would seem that A equals B, B or C, but it does not see the principle of a social activity as not honoured.
And the alleged identity collapse is now just in case you think of it as some sort of identity argument, that would be a successful challenge to read.
You might catch that challenge. And then another one.
The other one is quintessentially greedy, and the other one is that someone remembers how they were done, something no one did.
You have lunatics seven days a week, vividly recalling having lost a battle in Belgium.
They stand there with their engines. I was. They have a French accent.
They wonder why the supplies came solely there from Portsmouth.
So so it simply says that this is what happens.
There's a wonderful line of readers that conjectures and theories of the creatures and nature so mimics these things.
So. So when I say that my other child shall read, he died without a theory.
I am simply showing a very strong sympathy for a Scottish common sense philosophy that thinks we're generally,
generally safe when we stick to systematic observation when possible measurement and framing,
very modest propositions based on what is available to persons of ordinary perception,
and that the further we get from that, the more turbid, uncharted waters of metaphysics as they wrote this.
Someone with a lot of nervous about. Was.
I will keep going about certain things. Quote. Until the.
Stealing told Heaps. It's all part of a quest.
Those of us closer to that motive, I think have probably find that a more chilling statement from YouTube.
So. So now the other thing, though,
is that the other disappointment with luck is that you still have this entity reflecting on the contents of its consciousness.
So in addition to certain logical problems with the thesis and common sense counterintuitive problems with thesis,
it doesn't really do the job it's set out to do because you still have some sort of enduring
X that must be the the entity reflecting on the contents of consciousness so predictably.
Editor Hugh Chou quote I think this is word for word on the stone.
But when I search for my soul, I can find nothing but a bundle of perceptions and can find nothing but a bundle of assumptions.
Now. This is a predictable empiricist position on the question, but do follow what you to say.
Try to get some sort. About anything.
But isn't is reducible to his thought about some things about figures at the level of perception.
If even if it's some sort of rearrangement or forward process to me thinking is to be thinking about something.
So you might just be thinking about the relations of ideas.
You know that every number is equal to itself.
But if you're conducting, if you're thinking about something, you are granting a physical reality to call yourself.
Then you're thinking in property terms. You're thinking that you're sitting here thinking that you're tired.
It's thinking that it was cold about a half hour ago. You got in this lecture, etc., etc.
So so what's what you meant is above the perceptions.
And I might ask the question, well, don't we need a precipitate now, observing the bubble of perceptions and after all,
what constitutes the ground of the continuity of the entity in question there?
Job offers this interesting reply.
This is what? Think of a parade formation.
Now everyone marching in the parade is replaceable.
And as long as when one party drops out, he is replaced by another one.
The continuity of the formation is preserved, even though you have these otherwise incessant changes.
So this is almost a kind of of the stream of consciousness, this this this continuous flow of of experiences.
What would have changed referred to. Rather poetically as the ever passing present thought.
So the public perception, what moderates have to say about the public perceptions and those sceptical position and so self.
And take control of the cojones time so you don't start to misbehave when it comes to these philosophical productions.
He says it seems to be a particular strain of humour in this man.
He's referring to one particular strain of humour.
This author of Deathless Prose admired the world over by its medic that he is nonetheless not doubtful about his own existence,
but about the very readership on whom his authority holds.
You see?
Esprit de corps, Freeth says a man who just believes his own existence is no more fit to be reasoned with than one of the things he's made of glass.
As for the Battle of Perceptions, Ridge said, It has always been my view that for there to be treason, there must be a traitor.
And so if in fact, there is this bubble of perception, which presumably it's in here and you.
They all find Reed so playful in these regards that you might think this is philosophy lite.
Read the whole in these are asides. I think that very much in this burglary tradition.
I mean, then much later as the memoirs of Dr. Spring last I think show first in 1714 or is published in 1764,
but there's already a great respect for what our company has produced.
So composition is predictably totally different from either the empiricist side of the equation.
While the Scottish common sense side of the equation, as I've said repeatedly, that the longer I stay with this literature, the more convinced I am.
The riots in the courtroom in redacted translated for Michael influence costs for.
I'm joined in this judgement by Karl Emmerich's, who in my estimation is perhaps the best of our contemporary content scholars, not of Notre Dame.
For Conte, it is a necessary feature of the human mind that experiences are unified in a single consciousness.
It's only when there is consciousness.
As a result of the synthesis of the manifold that in a sense can rise to the levels of a comprehended state or condition with content.
The transcendental unity of perception refers then to what are finally the
necessary conditions for the unification of elements of of empirical perception.
These things that are gleamed by the senses give rise to sensations,
and these sensations then are in the form of perceptions becoming subsumed under general categories.
All of this must be unified. Do you understand why it must be unified?
If Jacques is the one who senses the blue and is the one who senses the tree and frank this it.
You get the picture. There's no way any of this can be merged into a scene.
And nonetheless, there isn't anything in the stimulus itself.
That's implies a means of unification. This has to be an entree or a power compromise of a certain kind, namely lines of power.
So the transcendent of unity of perception refers to one of our finally necessary
conditions for the unification of the various elements of imperial perception.
But this must stop right after your is established by the fact that nothing of the level of
appearances themselves contains within it the means by which to establish such unification.
It's not in the stimulus. What is required is what country refers to as an act of the imagination.
This is ab1 54 and that section where we pay close reading on your part.
What's required is what country refers to as an act of the imagination, which is known not as a representation, but directly by way of the act itself.
To quote, become a theme. 153. It is conscious to itself, even without sensibility abuse.
But the version that you. As a conscious entity are aware of these powers that you have.
It's not something engaged by or triggered by sensibility itself.
This is something that would be there when they're not sensitive. As this isn't necessarily a universal condition of of experience itself.
It is grounded in a long primary substrate which controls transcendental ego.
So save me from saying anything contemporary plays.
The role begins to sound like the telegraph. But I do think it would be useful for persons taking on the very difficult task of.
The self, right? So to make a distinction between conscious, transcendental ego and conscious imperative.
Most of the literature on this has to do with what might be called the psychological dimensions of self.
Transcendental dimension is the necessary dimension.
It's. It's what can be argued into place.
If no one. Whatever. One seven.
It's not the fact that you're aware of some of these things happening.
In fact, more than not, they really are the other conditions of the unification of empirical assumptions that wouldn't be any rational.
You know why? Because there wouldn't be any sort. That's what he said.
But the transcendent unity of a perception test is, of course.
As this is a necessary and universal condition.
It's grounded in a long primary substrate, and that's the one secondary for us tourism transport vehicles.
James SPENCELEY It's summarised con's concept of this transcendental.
Eco, contrasting it with the pure ego.
I want to read you a passage from Van Cleef, but I also want you to know that I.
Strongly disagree. That all sounds like dyspepsia.
I'd be quite concerned about the last sentence in this passage.
Quote, In the philosophy of the client, the transcendental ego is the thinker of ourselves, the subject of our experiences,
the will of our actions, and the age of the various activities of synthesis that help to constitute the world we experience.
Without hesitation. I say that that's decent enough.
Quick summary. But he says it is probably to be identified with a real or new level.
So. We know that.
We know those things like that. This is where you do you want to engage in that exercise of tax rates,
of laying your hands across your lips so every time you're on the verge of saying on,
you know what it is nominally you want to say, well, you know what it is should.
And. And so before 1984, 90, 25, 20.
The transcendental subject is included by couch with the sole problem as it exists in itself.
And that, I think, is what led you to say, well, you know,
it's it's this is this is make no myself can't is suggesting something that's equated with not something that you know has.
Now this is contrasted with an impurity which is reached by way of introspection.
The arc, the self that accompanies the whole experience of consciousness as a subjective speech perception and distinguishes one person from another.
When you say things like, Let me change something about myself, but that's what you're referring to.
You know, that's not the transcendental you know, that's the case.
It's just self-disclosure is a very effective form of immigration.
Unfortunately, we learn this very early age, and so we become Gaby for the next 70 years.
Well, let me tell you about this. To which the polite reply is obviously disturbed.
So against human caused hopelessness as a conclusion.
It is absolutely necessary, but in my knowledge, all consciousness should be to a single consciousness that of my self.
If you see, she'll just give us the bullet.
The Big Long has some kind of mechanism by which some watch psychic stuffs perceptual stuff, but old stuff gets held together.
But. But not in the way that they could be.
No, because there isn't a no. A few knows that some of the psychics writings.
When Count says this, he is not offering a factual claim based on introspection.
Rather, it pertains to the logical form of all knowledge as necessarily relating to a faculty or power by which unification becomes possible.
And this just is the faculty of Perception.
So Congress had to explain a fundamental perception which might rise to the level of human understanding.
And in the end, how might we best summarise that explanation?
We should tell you that. But he is respectful of children and they, as regards that, not just awakened to a dogmatic sloth,
but he sees here as the culmination and comes to the culmination of of of an empirical tradition, but in important respects includes Newt.
You've got to be very careful about what part of this project you're going to jettison because he.