Seminar 1.

Socrates thoughts

At the end of the discussion trying to define "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we don't see and hear "with" the eyes and ears, but "through" the eyes and ears. Socrates says that "any given thing is to me as it appears to me, and to you such as it appears to you". That is that we perceive things differently. For example, you can't be sure if a colour which appears as the colour red for you, appears the same for everyone else. When we feel, hear and see things, what we perceive is shaped by our own experiences and senses which are different for different people. Therefore the channels for which we experience things (e.g eyes and ears) may be seen upon as tools. Therefore the information which enters our different channels is shaped and interpetated by our mind is the reason for seeing and hearing "through" our eyes and ears.

"Empiricism has its origin in theories which state that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. Only that which is proven by experience can be regarded as reliable. Empiricism also emphasizes evidence especially as discovered in experiments, it includes the idea that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations."

Therefore, it is correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism" because of the principle that nothing is self-existent. You can't be sure that anything appears the same for two different persons because of how we perceive things differently related to our own senses and experiences. Therefore empirical observations are relative to the individual and are not the same for everyone.

Kant

In "Critique of Pure Reason" Kant describes how we can look upon the world in two different ways. "The world of noumena" and "The world of phenoma". The world of noumena is basically how things are in themselves, that is, without the world seen with our build in "sunglasses". Through our sunglasses what we consider as reality is shaped by the glasses. That is, the mind does not passively accept information but tries to shape and make sense of the information. This is the reason for us experiencing for example time and space. Our knowledge of space and time arises with the experience of it but is not ultimately from experience, because we can only see the world of phenomena, not the world of noumena. Things we perceive might therefore not be "real" knowledge.

Kant explains that is has been assumed that our knowledge must conform to objects, but instead believes that better progress will be made if objects instead conform to the mind. As earlier said the mind is not a passive clean slate, and we can discover how it is active by examine the "sunglasses". "The role of reason is therefore to understand itself", it is impossible to know things-in-themselves in the world of noumena however, we might be able to understand what and how we can know things by examining the sunglasses. Basically, by examining how we look at different things might lead to a better understanding of the "reality". 

Oscar Aldrin