Dear Jean,

Your “Woody Allen” comment to Jerry Dietheim’s post wasn’t quite fair. Jerry didn’t summarize Kant. He offered Irvin Yalom’s interpretation of Kant’s views on a specific aspect of knowledge.

We do this whenever we quote and apply a passage from an author to a problem. We don’t summarize all of the author’s work. We interpret and apply an idea from a specific point within a specific work. The art of this application is to choose a relevantpassage and to use it well. This involves what Victor Margolin describes in an earlier thread as intertextuality.

In my view, Jerry did that in an appropriate way. Jerry’s source is not Kant, but Irvin Yalom, a physician, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist who summarized one issue from Kant in a passage in the book Jerry quoted.

Yalom is professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University. He has a deep interest in the relationship of philosophy to psychotherapy and the relationship of philosophy to the way we construct and interpret our world. Along with his scholarly articles and books, Yalom has written three novels in a genre he calls “teaching novels.”

Yalom’s teaching novels use fiction to address genuine problems. He reflects on and writes about the philosophical underpinnings and psychotherapeutic meaning of the action he portrays. In philosophy, similar novels by other authors include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig, or Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder.

Yalom is serious about the teaching mission of his novels. Linked to the fictional plot, he offers the kind of information that one would expect to find in a scholarlywork, hopefully made tangible and more comprehensible by its active presentation in the fictional life of the characters. The Schopenhauer Cure is one of those novels. While most critics praise the intellectual depth and integrity of the novels with respect to psychotherapy and philosophy, some argue that Yalom takes his teaching mission too seriously, exploring and reflecting on ideas while breaking the momentum of the plot.

Jerry posted Yalom’s interpretation of an issue in the thread. Without agreeing – or disagreeing – with the cited passage, I’d argue that it is a reasonable argument that is relevant to the thread. It’s not a summary of Kant, but an apposite contribution based Yalom’s reading of Kant’s ideas on the topic, and Schopenhauer’s response to Kant. What makes this unreasonable or unsuitable to reasoning?

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design


Jean Schneider wrote:

—snip—

Wow! Summarising Kant in these 11 lines reminds me of Woody Allen’s: “ I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” Can’t do any reasoning on that !

—snip—

Jerry Dietheim wrote:

—snip—

Here’s a quote that provides the Kantian and Schopenhauerian perspective on the discussion:

Page 232, The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom

“Schopenhauer’s major work began with a critique and an extension of Kant, who revolutionized philosophy through his insight that we constitute rather than perceive reality. Kant realized that all our sense data are filtered through our neural apparatus and reassembled therein to provide us with a picture that we call reality but which in fact is only a chimera, a fiction
that emerges from our conceptualizing and categorizing mind. Indeed, even cause and effect, sequence, quantity, space, time are conceptualizations, constructs, not entities ‘out there’ in nature.

“Furthermore, we cannot ‘see’ past our processed version of what’s out there; we have no way of knowing what is ‘really’ there - that is, the entity that exists prior to our perceptual and intellectual processing. The primary entity, which Kant called ding an sich (the thing in itself), will and must remain forever unknowable to us.

“Though Schopenhauer agreed that we can never know the ‘thing in itself,’ he believed we can get closer to it than Kant had thought. In his opinion, Kant had overlooked a major source of valuable information about the perceived (the phenomenal) world: our own bodies! Bodies are material objects. They exist in time and space. And each of us has an extraordinary rich knowledge of our bodies - knowledge stemming not from our perceptual and conceptual apparatus but from direct knowledge from inside, knowledge stemming from our feelings.

“From our bodies we gain knowledge that we cannot conceptualize and communicate because the greater part of our inner lives is unknown to us. It is repressed and not permitted to break into consciousness, because knowing our deeper natures (our cruelty, fear, envy, sexual lust, aggression, self-seeking) would cause us more disturbance than we could bear.”



-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------