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I never read anything by Kant cover to cover, but a lecturer told me no one would think he was consistently right now, anyway.

But Kant is taken very seriously by OOP, if only so that they can debunk him.

But why?

I have even seen it said in OOP that since Kant, no one has been able to really understand objects, as if his "revolution" actually was that, something that needed to be explicitly over turned before certain thoughts [!] were possible.

Take this quote:

google books on OOP

Note that Meillassoux isn't a naive realist.

  • it may be worth noting that M. seems to be trying to create a new breed of anti correlationist HUMANS. so there's definitely something there to the idea that some way of thinking was actually IMPOSSIBLE –  Feb 12 '15 at 06:55
  • mhh, i came to this subforum from SO and to me OOP always meant Object Oriented Programming ;-) – yamm Feb 12 '15 at 08:45
  • Same here, I've heard of OO programming but never OO philosophy. References por favor? – user4894 Feb 12 '15 at 20:25
  • @user4894 its object-oriented ontology. wiki quote 'Thus, for object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.' – yamm Feb 13 '15 at 09:21
  • Why is Marx sooooo underrated!!!!!!!! His influence is sooo HUUUUUUUUUUGE. –  Mar 24 '15 at 03:47

2 Answers2

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Kant's influence cannot be measured by the number of his specific theses which are considered correct today. What Kant discovered was a new concept, a new way of thinking, a new rationalist philosophical paradigm. And this paradigm was more suitable to the modern mind than its rationalist predecessors. In a characteristic methodical manner, Kant took the new paradigm deep and wide, leaving no philosophical stone unturned. With this he shook the philosophical world to the core. And so the philosophy after Kant is tangibly different from the philosophy before Kant.

Kant famously said that David Hume's work woke him up from his slumber. Kant criticized Hume's empiricism on many issues, but he accepted, and further defended, the general thesis that knowledge cannot be had from beyond the bounds of possible sense experience. The combined attacks of Hume's empiricism and Kant's rationalism against the very possibility of transcendent knowledge was very effective. Since Kant and Hume, the possibility of transcendent knowledge is considered hopeless, and is therefore no longer taken seriously in mainstream philosophy. And this is the kind of historical influence that the Object Oriented Philosophers hope to overturn.

Ram Tobolski
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    i'm not sure i understand what you mean by transcendent knowledge because there seems to have been a lot of mainstream philosophers who claim to know things "beyond the bounds of possible sense experience" –  Feb 15 '15 at 17:44
  • @MATHEMATICIAN After Kant? Please name a few. – Ram Tobolski Feb 15 '15 at 18:06
  • any scientific realist believes in unobservables, in some form or other –  Feb 16 '15 at 04:05
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    @MATH These beliefs are still based on sense experience. They are not "beyond the bounds of experience" in Kant's sense. – Ram Tobolski Feb 16 '15 at 09:28
  • ok, yeah i get what you meant now :) –  Feb 16 '15 at 10:50
  • ... are you sure this is what bother OOP? i can only find five hits for "transcendental knowledge" and OOP ... –  Feb 16 '15 at 11:13
  • i get what you mean, that is a nice explanation, but i don't see how it can be accurate, just because it looks like none of these philosophers mention the term. –  Feb 16 '15 at 11:31
  • @MATHEMATICIAN It seems to me a matter of mere terminology. The OOP prefer to use the term "correlationist" for views that reject transcendent knowledge. See "Object-oriented ontology is often viewed as a subset of speculative realism, a contemporary school of thought that criticizes the post-Kantian reduction of philosophical enquiry to a correlation between thought and being, such that the reality of anything outside of this correlation is unknowable" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology) – Ram Tobolski Feb 16 '15 at 12:57
  • oh i thought the correlation was just idealism. –  Feb 18 '15 at 06:47
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This is actually a common pattern in philosophy. A philosopher will identify a problem that no one had considered before and propose a solution. Subsequent thinkers will disagree with the solution, but agree with the existence of the problem. The philosopher's lasting contribution therefore becomes the formulation of the problem, not of the solution.

It seems perfectly correct to me to state that before Kant, certain thoughts were not even possible --that's the mark of a great philosopher.

EDIT: I don't think it changes things much to say that certain thoughts only become possible in rejection of Kant. Again, that matches my original contention that the philosopher is defined as much by the questions he or she asks as by the answers. Conversely, we are often as shaped by what we reject as we are by what we embrace.

Chris Sunami
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