Educational theorist and cognitive scientist Howard Gardner in his book The Unschooled Mind argues that Kantian categories, apart from reflecting reality, are constraints upon our understanding of it. He refers to them as "Kantian-Einsteinian constraints," because Einstein taught us very well indeed that our understanding of objects, space, and time can change drastically through empirical inquiry, even though it is nearly impossible for most people to have a firm understanding of the world in the Einsteinian view. Our intuitions and our non-inferential judgments result from the rules of the particular symbol system in which we are dealing with and do not necessarily reflect nature. They, at best, are short-hand approximations of the laws by which our immediate environment operates.
I'm not that familiar with Einstein's physics, but I know Kant well enough to know that it sounds like Einstein's philosophy was different from Kant's. Now you know where theoretical physics has gone these days? Look up Max Tegmark for a scientifically defensible theory of a world perhaps at least as amazing as Kant's noumenal-phenomenal emanation theorem might strike some people (especially when he describes the distance there is within is between our knowledge of infinite self-commandment and finite physical causation, how the transcendental freedom we are given by the former... well, perhaps this all sounds more flowery than Plato).
Then again, there are also the deconstructionists(?) who would critique the nature of scientific language's self-applied justification.
The best point you can make on Kant's behalf is the concision of his most decisive arguments. Like since ought implies can, then we always have the power to do what we ought to, no matter what we actually end up doing, which means we make choices that violate physical causation unless they take place in fact in some transcendental eternity where time's linear relationships are not the ultimate structure of that world's laws. Since in theoretical physics hypertemporal physics are actually nowadays under accredited consideration, this opens up a lot of space for Kantian metaphysics to be assimilated more celestially to contemporary science. You know Kant figured out how galaxies form just by thinking about it? He imagined the force of gravity operating on masses of energy in these gyring waves that forged stars that emanated planets and so on until presto, galaxy.
No, of course not, but our moral intuitions evolved to better facilitate group cooperation. Morality, as I see it, is the act of maintaining a balance between individuality and social responsibility.
Loads of people have moral intuitions that promote destruction. The concept of morality isn't the same as the concept of group cooperation. Group cooperation is something that has to be itself justified to count as morally good by a moral philosophical theory's lights.
Sure, but even Rawls stated that he relied on Kant for lack of a better foundation, IIRC. That was in 1975. Empirical psychology moves at a much faster pace than philosophy.
Philosophy doesn't work like that. It's more about refining questions than calcifying one's mind with attempted answers. That's part of why it seems like it never goes anywhere. More importantly, what Rawls wrote in
A Theory of Justice was a very complex argument in support of two moral principles that he proposed were as close to the truth as any had been able to argue for before with regard to certain moral issues. It was published first in 1971, and part of its meaning was a barely veiled reference to the immorality of the American war in Southeast Asia at the time. So some of its arguments involve reference to say, the justification of civil disobedience. These are subsumed under the concept of the argument from the original position, which helps us to imagine more clearly what it is when we say that civil disobedience is justified in the face of diabolical evil on the part of our own government (as was underway at the time). In the original position, a supportive community is established but not out of compassion for others nor out of self-absorption. As Rawls says in game-theoretic terms (which are very important in the theoretical-physics parallel for, say, evolutionary biology, genetics, or even computing), the players in the Game of the Initial Situation aren't trying to directly help any other player, but they're not trying to directly hurt any of them, either: they all strive for the independent highest score possible in the Game by itself. Suppose they're all playing pinball at the same time, the same set of tables: they're not going to be directly be competing with anyone else, they should be concerned just how just the world would be if justified the way the score in the Game would be as long was everyone was given a chance to play the Game together throughout every land in all the world
sub species aeternitatis(sp.?)--in the light of all eternity.
You can imagine how relevant the idea is here that mathematics is a fictional structure that is yet somehow true and false in what it says--as if mathematics is the story that has been passed down through that ages with a certain inner symbolic meaning that can evolve into this perhaps weird patterns like the aleph-numbers. Now the aleph-numbers are said to be--and actually the proof of this is so simple anyone young enough to understand infinite non-repeating decimals in relation to repeating ones, the counting numbers, etc. supposedly can be given to understand it--and this is the foundation of all contemporary mathematics and therefore computing and theoretical physics--the overriding form of proof for anything nowadays in science, perhaps--the transfinite numbers are different orders of infinity. So aleph-zero is the first infinity, the infinity of the numbers up to and including infinitely repeating decimals, and aleph-one I think is the infinity of the real numbers, or maybe there's this unsolved question in mathematics as to if there are numbers infinitely between these two, I don't remember, but that's kind of not even the start of it. Because we can anyway say there's an aleph-zero, we can say there's an aleph-one, an aleph-two, an aleph-three, and so on and on. These are all infinities that are greater in magnitude than the prior, even if we don't know anything else about, say, aleph-seventy-trillion. Yet that's not even the end of it.
What happens is you can say that there's also aleph-aleph-zero, aleph-aleph-one, and so on, then also aleph-aleph-aleph-zero and so on, and so on and on and on. You can do a bunch of other stuff to prove the existence of so many more orders and kinds, you find out some aren't "accessible" (I never remember what that means), and that there might even be an Absolute Infinite--the unconditional transcendental reason whereby all possible infinity is united.
