Showing posts from July, 2011

Running Free

This is the second post by longtime friend and guest blogger, Zach V. I'm always excited to have different voices and perspectives speak out on philosophy and running. Thanks, Zach!
If you’re a runner, you’re probably a Marxist. That’s because--…

Understanding the Body, Becoming a Body

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes of what he calls the "transcendental object," and he refers to it sometimes as the "= x." Das ding an sich--the thing in itself. Kant's point when writing about the transcendental object is that objects are somewhat slippery to the human mind. Kant believes that we never truly apprehend things as they are. We see, instead, a kind of messy blend of sense-impressions and mental concepts. His ultimate point: the thing in itself is unknowable.

Though this sounds a bit like skepticism, Kant's view is different from common-sense skepticism which essentially denies any capacity for knowledge. Though Kant believed we could never apprehend the world as it is, he thought we could apprehend it better. We could refine our mental concepts so that they better mapped onto the world. We could also improve our capacity for sensation--we could learn to sense the world better so that our intuitions of objects become riper and fuller.