Nice to see posts about Kant, but this is very conceptually sloppy. Transcendental philosophy is about grounding synthetic a priori, which the third categories are examples of. The concept of “the sphere of possible existences” is not the same as the world (which is an a priori regulative idea) but denotes the infinite possibility determined only by the lack of contradiction. Categories are conditions of possible experience, meaning that they are required to syntesize empirical data into knowledge (without it you only have a sensible manifold,a chaotic data flow). The author should research transcendental aesthetics and Kant's distinctions between concepts and ideas to get a better understanding of Kant and epistemology in general.
> The concept of “the sphere of possible existences” is not the same as the world (which is an a priori regulative idea) but denotes the infinite possibility determined only by the lack of contradiction.
If we look at the example, the lack of contradiction is one condition, but there is another one - totality.
The sentence "the whole sphere of possible existences, the mortal occupies one part, and the immortal the other." contains the assumption that all objects in the universe are either mortal or immortal, which is questionable e.g. what about the things that are not alive in the first place? e.g. is a chair mortal or immortal?
This issue is not present in the dichotomy between reality and negation e.g. the dichotomy between "mortal" and "not mortal" - here it is easy to sort all possible objects to mortal, e.g. a chair is clearly not mortal. In my view this is the difference between reality and negation.
I was getting at that it denotes the sphere of posssibility not the world, the wolrd is different idea for Kant and is at the centre of his project. His philosophy project is trying to continue the projects of his time (Baumgarten and Wolff) and in Wolff he sees the ultimate failiure of philosophy as he can't ground the concept of the world (no totality of space/time just singular things, which for Kant means a problem with scientific principles). Another point, based on my own work not general scholarship, is that the negation/affirmation/limitation is paradigmatic here, and we see very explicitly the conditions of transcendental philosophy as the necessity of separating limitation and negation that in non-critical philosophies coincide and concerns infinite judgments (judgments where the predicate includes negation). The procedure of transcendental philosophy is like logic but without abstracting from content, by analysis of necessary conditions and limitation of speculation that precludes judgments from deducing A from non-A because of transcendental aesthetics. So to come back to the categories, there is the infinite space of possible predicates of soul (each subject of judgment gets its own infinity, this is analysis of term logic) and we have the predicate 'mortal' excluded from it, this negation does not negate the infinity of possible predicates of the soul, so our knowledge of the soul remains the same (no apophatic theology). This has to do with the knowledge of things in themselves, not the universe/the world.
I didn't notice strange fonts and was wondering what people were complaining about. Remembered I set my own fonts, and "not allow pages to choose their own fonts". And the DarkReader theme ensures I got the same colors on any webpage. It's almost as consistent as browsing gemini://
All the webfonts are truly a thing I can live without, right after ads.
____
The article was great. I thought it was one of the few things about Kant, including all the things *from* Kant, my tiny brain is able to comprehend. Sometimes it feels like learning about each philosopher is like starting from scratch. Almost like starting a new programming language. To really understand everything I have not only read all their material but also read everything they have read. And by the time I get good at it I am almost ready to come up with my own model of how the world works. I still can't say I totally understand Kant. But the best introduction to Kant I had was by Schopenhauer's "Parerga and Paralipomena"[1].
No clue either, but interestingly the reader mode was available after I disabled content blockers (that's on Safari on Mac). So I take it back; I read the post and it is quite interesting :)
I am curious now, how did you come to get interested in this topic?
That font, though... It's not that it sucks in general, but it is a bit too quirky to be read comfortably for more than one sentence. At least to me. The combination of sharp angles, irregular curves, and seemingly randomly varying thickness.
