I have recently been overwhelmed by a large number of scientific topics that bear one very important relation to one another. The relationship is the theme of holism; or, more accurately, the debate between reductive and holistic science. Plato’s notion of carving nature at its joints is one that the early modern through present scientific ventures embrace and take for granted. The point of the following post is not to rehash any of the points in the reduction/anti-reduction debate, but to present some perspective, without actually going into the debate. More or less, I was to touch on some of the philosophical features that have jumped out at me, as of late. Continue reading
Tag Archives: autopoiesis
Assessing the Explaining Away of Elements of the Human World Qua Experience
Filed under Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Autopoiesis and Kant’s Theory of Time
Kant had a pretty trippy and extremely fascinating view of time. (The Hstorical Dictionary of Kant and Kantianism says “innovative,” which I gladly grant.) For Kant, time is a “pure form of sensible intuition” (Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith trans., 2003, pg. 75), and “[t]ime is nothing but the form of internal sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner senses. It cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the relation of representations in our inner state” (ibid. pg. 77). Continue reading
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