Sun-hong’s online journal

Preface

Acrisis in the theory of meaning and rationality.

Without imagination, nothing in the world could be meaningful. Without imagination, we could never make sense of our experience. Without imagination, we could never reason toward knoweldge of reality. (P.IX)

Kant thus claims to solve the skeptical problem of how we can know that our concepts correspond to objective reality as follows: What we can know of the external world is what we have received from it, as filtered through and structure by our consciousness. We cannot know things as they are in themselves but only as they appear for us, subject to the universal structuring activity of human consciousness. (p.xxviii).

As I have noted, there is an overly rigid dichotomy between the conceptual and the bodily. Concepts are products of our understanding, which is formal, spontaneous, and rule-governed; sensations are bodily, given through our sensibility, which is material, passive, and lacking in any active principle of combination or synthesis. (p.xxviii).