The Brooks

Yes, I know. I’m ripping this guy off. But hey, it’s a good idea. So what?

1. ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead.’ Stephen Harper comments on the passing of former Supreme Court justice Antonio Lamer. You can almost hear him celebrate can’t you? As Chief Justice, Lamer was responsible for the restructuring of legislative and judicial power in Canada. See here for an explanation of the infamous Re Renumeration of Judges and Secession cases.

2. OK I admit it. Private health insurance may have some problems.

3. Not a bad idea … but Wal-Mart is definitely not doing this for religious reasons. And I don’t think that should be the sole factor in determining whether one should shop there or not. Talk about simplistic thinking.

4. A stirring defense of Wal-Mart against all detractors. Solid arguments except for the section on health care.

5. Due to Brian Walsh, I’ve become interested in the work of Bob Goudzwaard. Here’s his homepage. He has an interesting new work published entitled Hope in Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises.

6. Worship the god of consumerism. (HT: Crunchy Con).

7. The Law Reform Commission of Canada’s 1976 report on criminal law stated, “Criminal law must be an instrument of last resort. It must be used as little as possible.” Someone tell this to Iran. According to Iranian police officials, more than 150,000 women were arrested in Tehran just last month for “bad veils.”

8. Advent is here … and it’s not all good news.

9. WTF? It’s articles like this that make me want to go more right wing.

10. Whatever you do, don’t call your teddy bear Mohammed. Tolerance at its finest in Sudan.

Here are lecture notes on Kant snd the noumena from Dr. Davis. This hopefully will help with the discussion in the comments section of this post.

[A] There are 2 senses of the term ‘noumenon’

[A1] The negative sense – that which is not an object of sensible intuition

[A2] The positive sense – that which is the object of a non-sensible (intellectual) intuition

[B] ‘Noumenon’ must be understood in the negative sense

[B1] There is no faculty of intuition

[B2] ‘Doubtless’ there are noumena corresponding to the phenomena, but the categories don’t apply to them.

[B2i] For the categories are ‘forms of thought’ for sensible intuition.

—————

Ben, earlier you said:

This isn’t really all that true. Kant believed that the Noumenal is “thought by understanding alone.” He never said we can’t know it at all, just not through sensation.

I’m not sure where you got your definition from… I have Critique right here in front of me and I’m quoting the man himself.

Does this help? It seems that the noumena cannot be understood in the positive sense, which I believe your quote was referring to. I could be wrong though, but that’s how I read Dr. D’s lecture notes.

More action here in the comments.

Brian Walsh isn’t a fan of Francis Fukuyama. In Subversive Christianity, Walsh takes one of the ideological big shots for neoconservatism to task on a number of points.

First, the background. Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. It was based on a 1989 essay published in The National Interest called “The End of History?” The context is the end of the Cold War.

The thesis?

… the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started … to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.

For Fukuyama, history witnessed the goal of history with the fall of the Soviet Union. The victory of liberal democratic capitalism marks

The end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s democratic ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

This is pure Hegel. Ideas are the driving force of history. And the idea of capitalism has won.

I’ll post Walsh’s critique and assess it tomorrow.

Other parts to this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

On my last post, Ben responds to some critiques. Time for some Fisking. I’m only going to deal with what has to do with Kant as this has been my only concern.

First, Dan said this about Ben and Kant:

1. You believe, like Kant, that there are both noumena and phenomena.

Ben responded:

On point 1, I don’t subscribe to Kant’s view explicitly. There’s merit.

OK. This is the problem. I raised this in a comment on your blog. In what specific sense do you actually agree with Kant? Whenever you say something like “I generally agree with Kant,” I feel like it lets you off the hook whenever a critique of Kant comes your way. You can say, “Oh well, of course I don’t agree with him there.” His other stuff is ok though.

The presence of dark matter, gravity, and consciousness are all difficult to argue examples of real things that we can’t sense (but can learn about by other means). Let’s not get hung up on “noumenon” and “phenomenon.”

I don’t see what you’re talking about here. Kant’s main point with the noumena and phenomena is that reality cannot be known, only the appearance of reality can be known. There is no guarantee that there is a correlation between the two. This leaves one in a sort of epistemological Switzerland, if you know what I mean. My prior arguments address this.

Unless Plantinga can refute the reality of the mind (which is actually the basis of one of his most famous arguments in favour of considering the reality of God), then I think there’s merit to the point: there are real things we can’t sense, and must investigate by other means.
 

OK … but what does this point have to do with Kant? Perhaps I’m misreading him, but I don’t think I am.

You seem to be saying we can know X, but not through our senses. Your thinking diverges from Kant on this when you say that you can know X. Kant believed that human knowledge never brought us into contact with the real world. By definition, the noumena is unknowable.  

As God is part of the noumena, Kantian philosophy is un-Christian. This is why I’m attacking his thought.

My cautious approach to a more Christian epistemology would say that God has ordered the rational structures of our mind to correspond to the rational order found in the world. There is no need for any noumena / phenomena or Kant.

 Doug Groothuis has an excellent post on being literate. Money quote:

“For many of the image bearers of God in our day being literate is neither a goal nor a possibility. They have been rendered functionally autistic through the diversions of digital media, hyper hedonism, and pseudo-education that is more concerned with indoctrination than with the invocation of the muse, whose presence can transport us to unexplored lands of truth, even to eternity.”

Functionally autistic. That makes me giggle.

This is part 3 of a series on Immanuel Kant. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.

I’m going old school on this post. A little 2001-2002 Tyndale action. Dr. Rich Davis is coming at you.

One of the points Kant makes when he talks about the noumena and the phenomena is that the categories of the phenomena do not apply to things in themselves.

There is a major problem with this.

Enter Rich Davis’ argument from existence …

1. Either the noumena exists or not
2. If not, then there are only phenomena, in which case the categories apply to things-in-themselves
   1. For there would be no distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves
3. If so, then surely the category of reality would apply to the noumena, in which case the categories do apply to thing-in-themselves
4. Therefore, the categories apply to things-in-themselves.

Uh oh.

I don’t see how Kant and his disciples can recover from this. Looks like Dinesh spoke a little too soon. There are refutations to Kant.

No, not D’Souza.

Daniel Bell, the author of 1976’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism seems to have recently recanted his older views on the social and spiritual problems of capitalism.

Dinesh D’Souza got the chance to interview Bell when he was writing The Virtue of Prosperity. In The Good of Affluence, John Schneider writes the following:

“When D’Souza contacted Daniel Bell, whose 1976 social critique of capitalism was among the fiercest of its generation, Bell strangely refused to talk about his earlier dire view of its failings. He had apparently withdrawn his influential thesis without notice. And in their telephone conversation Bell seemed annoyed by his own previous perspective, noting that ‘the truth is that the world is a much better place today than at any time during the twentieth century.'”

In a footnote, Schneider writes the following:

“When asked about his previous understanding of capitalism as the cause of spiritual and social decay, Bell responded, “Don’t talk to me about that. It’s all bullshit.””

Me like$$.

Now if only this guy would read some Schneider …

This is part 2. Part 1 is here.

D’Souza has claimed that Kant’s arguments have not been answered. Allow me to introduce my friend Alvin. In Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga offers a withering critique of Kant’s thought. See chapter 1 Dinesh.

Anytime you invoke a distinction between the phenomena and the noumena you are assuming a God’s eye view of the world. To simply know that there is a distinction, or to know that the noumena exists assumes objectivity. The problem is that Kant then denies the objectivity he initially assumes.

Uh oh.

More later.