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An example from a syllogism:

The REASON why Socrates is mortal [A is A] is that Socrates is a man [either or] and all men are mortal [no contradiction].

An example from a falllacy (ad hominem circumstantial):

The REASON why ad hominem is a fallacy is that just because Mr. X has never been to Holland [either or] doesn't mean [no contradiction] that he can't speak Dutch [A is A].

A simple example that I just thought of myself, through introspection:

The REASON why today is Monday [A is A] is because yesterday was Sunday [either or] and Monday always follows Sunday [no contradiction].

Reason not only subsumes logic, it can also be a synonym for logic.

I rest my case. :)

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Reason not only subsumes logic, it can also be a synonym for logic.

I rest my case.

In the sentence at the top of the quote, does reason mean the fact, the concept, or the name?

If reason there refers to the fact (a certain faculty existing in the mind of every man), then it cannot be a synonym, in the usual modern sense of the latter word: a term which labels the same idea as another term.

Ditto if reason there refers to a concept (of the fact of reason).

If reason there labels a name for a concept which refers to a fact, then reason can't subsume anything. Names of concepts don't subsume; only concepts (or other ideas) subsume. (Perhaps one could say that proper names subsume.)

If you mean some combination of these, then your sentence is an equivocation.

Further, taken at face value, the whole sentence is a contradiction. That would be like saying a bicycle is a wheel.

For that infraction, sentencing, so to speak, will be announced tomorrow.

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For that infraction, sentencing, so to speak, will be announced tomorrow.

:lol:

Ok, but please keep in mind that I reserve my right to appeal re: "subsume" and "synonomous" in the sense of Aristotle's usage of these terms in Categories:

In Categories 1a10 Aristotle says:

"When things have the name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is the same, they are called synonymous. Thus, for example, both a man and an ox are animals. Each of these is called, by a common name, an animal, and the definition of being is also the same; for if one is to give the definition of each--what being an animal is for each of them--one will give he same definition." (_Barnes_The Complete Works of Aristotle_vol. 1_p. 3)

I may be guilty of confusing Aristotle's usage of "genus" and "synonomous" with the modern usage of "synonomous" and Miss Rand's usage of "genus", but given the context of this discussion so far, I don't think I'm guilty of a frank equivocation. :)

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Further, you say Cicero was the translator of Aristotle into Latin. That is news to me. What is your evidence? Which works of Aristotle did Cicero translate into Latin?

Still further, you say Cicero was the first to create/apply the Latin word for "logic" (either logica or dialectica?) to this process. What process are you talking about? Do you mean logic (as we define it)? If so, what is your evidence for saying that Aristotle saw logic (as we define it) as a process? And what is your evidence for saying Cicero was the first to make that translation?

I'm sorry, but I'm far from being an expert on this. What I do know at least is that Cicero played a very important role in transmission of Aristotle to the Roman, and later to the Rennaissance, world. How I know this is partially from the story my professor on Aristotle told me some time ago.

The Greek word ousia can be roughly translated as "matter", or "substance" of something, and apparently one of its side translations is "wood" or "made out of wood". Cicero was reading Aristotle and was thinking how to translate that word ousia into Latin, and apparently what he did was to pick out and use the Latin word for "wood" or "made out of wood". This word is "materia". That's how we get our word 'matter'. Having written a book on transmission of Aristotle through the ages I am sure you know more about Aristotle's survival through antiquity than I, but this little story with Cicero, and a few others like it, indicate to me that he was a very important part of the link.

Secondly, in regard to whether Aristotle and Ayn Rand meant the same thing when saying 'reason', I think that the answer should be affirmative almost automatically, from all the gratitude AR heaped on Aristotle for his help. She undoubtedly expanded the definition for reason, and provided a more solid foundation, but from all my readings, and especially Aristotle's Ethics, the Greeks seem to use of logos as a sort of normative, lawful (obeying rules), objective faculty/process within our heads used to acquire true knowledge of the real world; to my knowledge, that use is pretty ubiquitous. This is part of what makes the Greeks so remarkable, because they gave birth to understanding and study of reason, as well as its appreciation.

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Alright, lets just drop the issue of what Aristotle may or may not have meant by "synonymous" in Categories. If we want, we can address this issue later.

I'd like to now retract my former statement that reason and logic are synonymous, and would like restate my earlier examples:

An example from a syllogism:

The REASON why Socrates is mortal [A is A]is that Socrates is a man [either or] and all men are mortal [no contradiction].

An example from a falllacy (ad hominem circumstantial):

The REASON why ad hominem is a fallacy is that just because Mr. X has never been to Holland [either or] doesn't mean [no contradiction] that he can't speak Dutch [A is A].

A simple example that I just thought of myself, through introspection:

The REASON why today is Monday [A is A] is because yesterday was Sunday [either or] and Monday always follows Sunday [no contradiction].

Based on these examples, (and we could go through many, many more) I'm very comfortable with the idea that reason subsumes logic. I'm not quite married to this idea just yet, but I'll have more to say as I re-read ITOE.

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What I do know at least is that Cicero played a very important role in transmission of Aristotle to the Roman, and later to the Rennaissance, world. [...]

[...] this little story with Cicero, and a few others like it, indicate to me that he was a very important part of the link.

You originally said Cicero was a "translator" of Aristotle. He wasn't, in the sense of turning texts of Aristotle in Greek into texts in Latin -- certainly not of the texts on logic, the subject of this thread. You are right on target now, however, with your comment about Cicero's role as a disseminator into his own culture and as a transmitter to the Latin-Christian ("Medieval") period and beyond.

Cicero's role was two-fold. First, he (often at second-hand, apparently) studied Aristotle's ideas, while visiting Greece. He wrote about these ideas -- along with the competing ideas of other Greek philosophers. See, for example, On the Ends of Good and Evil (De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, if I recall correctly). These books -- or parts of them -- passed to Augustine, on the edge of the Dark Ages, and then (with Augustine's endorsement) into Dark Age and early medieval Latin-Christian culture. Thus Cicero was a carrier of Aristotle's ideas (among many others less good), though not of his texts.

Second, Cicero sanctioned the study of Aristotle among Latin-Christians who were, in the early medieval period, suspicious of anything Greek because so many Greek Christians were heretics (by Western Christian standards). The early medieval and later medieval Christians saw Cicero as "one of ours." Why? Because he was indeed virtuous (a pre-Christ Christian) and because he was Latin. (If Objectivism had been developed by a Bantu who remained in South Africa, how long do you think it would have taken for Objectivism to have any influence on the U. S.? Probably a lot longer than with Ayn Rand, a naturalized American.) Finally when Aristotle's texts -- in Latin -- became more fully available, after c. 1130 CE, West Europeans were already hungry for them.

Secondly, in regard to whether Aristotle and Ayn Rand meant the same thing when saying 'reason', I think that the answer should be affirmative almost automatically, from all the gratitude AR heaped on Aristotle for his help.
Non-sequitur. She might have been praising him for the essentials of his whole philosophy, which was largely objective, though sometimes mistaken. This says nothing about Aristotle's concept of reason.

She undoubtedly expanded the definition for reason, and provided a more solid foundation [...]

Then it was not the same concept. A concept is no better than its context, and the "foundation" of a concept is certainly part of its context. Were the two ideas similar? Yes. Compatible? Yes. The same? No.

Again, I have not specifically researched this project as a problem in the field of the history of ideas, but I suspect, based on my readings, that the two concepts were not the same explicitly. Implicitly? Probably.

[... from all my readings, and especially Aristotle's Ethics, the Greeks seem to use of logos as a sort of normative, lawful (obeying rules), objective faculty/process within our heads used to acquire true knowledge of the real world; to my knowledge, that use is pretty ubiquitous. [...]

Would Plato -- the most influential of all the ancient philosophers in Greek culture -- fit your description? Do you believe he saw the role of reason being the understanding of this world? The "real world" for Plato was the other world, the other dimension, not this world. I am no Plato expert. I am basing my judgment on only the few dialogues I have read, but they all consistently point in the direction of using the mind for understanding things "higher" than this world.

My summary point is that answering a question like this takes long, meticulous study of many texts in their original language. Such a question cannot be answered definitively by relying on your or my impressions. The history of ideas is one of the most difficult subfields in the field of history.

P. S. -- Your questions and observations are very stimulating. You have a very quick mind. I hope -- for my own selfish reasons -- that your central purpose in life involves intellectual history or a related field.

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In Categories 1a10 Aristotle says:

  "When things have the name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is the same, they are called synonymous.  Thus, for example, both a man and an ox are animals.  Each of these is called, by a common name, an animal, and the definition of being is also the same; for if one is to give the definition of each--what being an animal is for each of them--one will give he same definition." (_Barnes_The Complete Works of Aristotle_vol. 1_p. 3)

The translation, above, in Barnes's edition of Aristotle's works looks like it is the one that J. L. Ackrill did in the 1960s. The location, actually, is 1a6-1a11.

I interpret Aristotle to mean that synonymous is not a synonym, as we understand the term today, but to mean that synonymous refers to what we today would call a genus.  Is this another example of what Burgess means by "a given word may name various ideas as time passes?"

Aristotle's word for "synonymous" in the translation is sunOnuma (where the O is an omega not an omicron). My Liddell and Scott Intermediate gives only one meaning for the two-form adjective, sunOnumos, -on: "of like name." Thus there is no ambiguity here -- for once!

So, no, this adjective does not refer to the noun genus, as a level of classification. Scholars debate whether the Categories is "really" about ontology, epistemology, or just the way we talk about things. There is a vast amount of literature on the subject, for anyone who wants to do the research.

(By the way, the word for "definition" in the passage above is logos, showing once again that one cannot automatically translate logos as "reason" in the Objectivist sense.)

All this technicality goes to show why I would prefer not to get into the details of particular Aristotle texts, even if they are on logic. The complexity is mind-boggling and not necessary. To philosophize, all we need is a brain and eyes: observation and thought. We do not need anyone's text. Of course, if we are talking about a particular philosopher's philosophy then we need her texts -- but no others.

The answer to the last queston -- Is this an example of something historians of ideas would study? -- is: Perhaps, but in this case the term attached to the idea is the same, allowing for the differences in language. Thus, the idea has remained identical and the term has hardly changed at all. Not a very exciting subject for historians of ideas -- who generally prefer bigger challenges.

Of course, the English "synonymous" is merely an Latinized form of sunOnumos. (The "-ous" suffix is a characteristic ending of a type of Latin adjective.) In the ancient world of philosophy, the Latins inherited rather than created, generally speaking. They often, not always, simply transliterated Greek into Latin -- and then 1500 years later English scholars Anglicized the Latin (or the Greek). This is like one mining company doing the digging, and then two other later ones cleaning up the original mine.

P. S. -- I must take a vacation from this thread for a little while.

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Would Plato -- the most influential of all the ancient philosophers in Greek culture -- fit your description?

Yes absolutely. Actually I was a little worried about my point when you brought up Plato, but then I remembered some of the details of his view and am pretty sure that Plato supports my view very strongly.

Take the Metaphor of the Cave - mankind is sitting in a cave, backs to the entrance, and we see the movements of the real world outside merely as shadows on the wall. To us the shadows are the real world. That's Plato's way of explaining our perceptual reality. Unlike Kant, however, Plato does not hold that reason holds no link to the world, quite the contrary! To him the world of ideas is real, in a metaphysical way. Our senses are merely our perceptions of the shadows, of things that are ever changing and therefore (to him) unreal. Only by using reason, Plato argues, can we arrive at the knowledge of the real world.

When we die and end up in the World of Forms, we perceive all of those Forms through our innate perception. He's vague on that point, from what I remember; the point is that we somehow perceive those forms, and so when we are born we already hold the knowledge of the real world within us. For Plato, the sensations of this visible world confuse and obscure the knowledge of the real world that is already contained within us; for him, to learn is not to waste time studing and measuring this fickle and unstable world of perceptions, but to ignore it; he says that the only way we learn anything is by remembering what we already know about the other, real world. And we engage in this learning, this remembering of the real world, using reason.

Reason plays an active role in Plato's philosophy, and it is strongly tied to Plato's own version of what the real world constitutes, even if his real world is not the same as ours. He even has mental perceptions which perceive that world of forms!

His conception of reason would hold no meaning if he didn't invest it with the power to grasp the real and true nature of reality. Contrast this with Descartes whose reason is detached from any reality whatsoever and who conceives of his existence as detached from everything at all, except its own process. Contrast this with Kant, whose reason is detached from the real world by definition of what reason tries to do.

Thus I think it is pretty evident that, unlike modern supernatural philosophers, Plato gives reason a very strong connection to what he believes to be real, as strong as possible for a supernatural philosophy such as his. And let's not forget that Plato, while very influential for the later ages, was rather shunned by the rest of the Greeks during his time and subsequent centuries. From what I can tell, his epistemology was a marginal view during the Classical era, being a rather extreme and unusual case of what Ancient philosophy produced; and even he made a strong attempt to ground the function and purpose of reason in the real world. Other schools appear to have been even more this-worldly, and to have tied reason to the real world even stronger.

I've read quite a few Greek and Roman book translations at this point and I have yet to see the nonsense that passes as common sense nowadays, that "we all understand things through our own prism of experience". The Ancients were excellent about what the nature of reason is, even if they didn't bother essentializing it all the way.

P. S. -- Your questions and observations are very stimulating. You have a very quick mind. I hope -- for my own selfish reasons -- that your central purpose in life involves intellectual history or a related field.
Thank you for those very kind words. As you seem to be someone who is distinguished in age and knowledge, I value your evaluation highly. As to my aims for the future, one of my key goals is to be a perpetual student of history, especially ancient. The study of Classical civilization will likely play a central role in my life; it is playing a key role right now, and will do so for the foreseable future. Intellectual history will of course be a big part of my eventual self-education, being a subset of the general programme I've set for myself.
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Yes absolutely. Actually I was a little worried about my point when you brought up Plato, but then I remembered some of the details of his view and am pretty sure that Plato supports my view very strongly.

Take the Metaphor of the Cave - [..]

When we die and end up in the World of Forms, we perceive all of those Forms through our innate perception. He's vague on that point, from what I remember; the point is that we somehow perceive those forms, and so when we are born we already hold the knowledge of the real world within us. [...]

His conception of reason [...]

(Boldface emphasis added.)

I no longer have time to write long posts. I will ask you to take on a disproportionate share of the work:

1. How does Ayn Rand define reason?

"Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses." (The Ayn Rand Lexicon, p. 407) Emphasis added.

Do you see here that she held that the material for reason comes through sense-perception, that is, through the use of the sense organs in our bodies?

2. How would Plato define reason?

I invite you to offer your own definition (for Plato, if he didn't provide one himself).

My definintion -- based on your own description of Plato's use of reason -- is that it is the faculty which understands the other-worldy Forms as gained initially through direct "perception" of that reality without the use of any organs of the human body. Here direct perception is intuition -- not sense-perception using organs of the body.

Ayn Rand's idea of perception as a source of material for reason is radically and irrecoverably different from Plato's idea of perception.

To base an argument for Plato's concept of reason as being the same as Ayn Rand's concept of reason is to commit an equivocation on perception.

Conclusion: Plato's concept of reason is radically opposed to Ayn Rand's concept of reason.

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I think you may be too strict in your requirements for a definition here. I don't know if Plato ever defined reason in any of his dialogues, and I am not really a big fan of his philosophy for understandable reasons, so I hope you'll understand if I simply try to give my own understanding of his philosophy without delving deeply into the source originals.

Ayn Rand's idea of perception as a source of material for reason is radically and irrecoverably different from Plato's idea of perception.

To base an argument for Plato's concept of reason as being the same as Ayn Rand's concept of reason is to commit an equivocation on perception.

Conclusion: Plato's concept of reason is radically opposed to Ayn Rand's concept of reason.

I believe you to be comitting a non sequitur here :) A picture will be worth a thousand words:

PLATO 
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This is different from the diagram on the right, where Kant and AR disagree about practically everything regarding what reason is, and what it can do; everything is different about the two lines, and the only way they are related to each other is that they both meet in the word 'reason'. These two meanings of the word 'reason' truly are 'irrevocably different'.

I don't think this is entirely true; they both used the word reason to describe different things, but this is because they were attacking different problems (and remember that Kant's use of the term 'reason' is a translation from his German, and was the standard usage of the term at that point in history, which was largely dominated by the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff). Kant was concerned with the 'low level' problem of how experiences are possible, including the necessary conditions for having them. Therefore, he used reason to refer to the faculty which humans to pass from receiving sensations ('intuitions') to perceiving actual objects, via the process of synthesis (ie the bringing of sensible intutions under the categories of the understanding). From what I've read of Rand she doesnt seem concerned with this issue - she agreed that it occurred somehow, but wasn't interested in the specifics (in Rand's terminology, I think Kant's 'synthesis' would be described as "the passage from the 'sensory level' to the 'level of perception'"). Since I havent found any work by Rand in which she writes about this at any length, its understandable that she wouldnt have needed the concepts which Kant used when analysing it in great detail. Likewise Kant wrote very little about the areas of epistemology with which Rand was concerned (namely how humans form and use concepts at the day-to-day level), which is why he wouldnt have used the concepts Rand used when discussing this. Different areas of philosophy (and philosophers) generally use different vocabularies, especially when they are seperated by several centuries.
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I don't think this is entirely true; they both used the word reason to describe different things, but this is because they were attacking different problems (and remember that Kant's use of the term 'reason' is a translation from his German, and was the standard usage of the term at that point in history, which was largely dominated by the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff). Kant was concerned with the 'low level' problem of how experiences are possible, including the necessary conditions for having them. Therefore, he used reason to refer to the faculty which humans to pass from receiving sensations ('intuitions') to perceiving actual objects, via the process of synthesis (ie the bringing of sensible intutions under the categories of the understanding). From what I've read of Rand she doesnt seem concerned with this issue - she agreed that it occurred somehow, but wasn't interested in the specifics (in Rand's terminology, I think Kant's 'synthesis' would be described as "the passage from the 'sensory level' to the 'level of perception'"). Since I havent found any work by Rand in which she writes about this at any length, its understandable that she wouldnt have needed the concepts which Kant used when analysing it in great detail. Likewise Kant wrote very little about the areas of epistemology with which Rand was concerned (namely how humans form and use concepts at the day-to-day level), which is why he wouldnt have used the concepts Rand used when discussing this. Different areas of philosophy (and philosophers) generally use different vocabularies, especially when they are seperated by several centuries.

Ayn Rand's conceptualizing of all this, as best as I presently understand, is that the process of going from sensations to percepts was automated in the adult, and non-automated for the pre-conceptual infant. By non-automated I here mean that the infant is aware of discrete sensations at the pre-perceptual level. The adult is not. The issues invovled in this process of going from sensations to perceps, for Ayn Rand, was therefore not an issue for philosophy but for the biological sciences.

My knowledge of German indicates that the concept vernunft also invovles judgement and I suspect that this is what Kant was trying to avoid.

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Ayn Rand's conceptualizing of all this, as best as I presently understand, is that the process of going from sensations to percepts was automated in the adult, and non-automated for the pre-conceptual infant.  By non-automated I here mean that the infant is aware of discrete sensations at the pre-perceptual level.  The adult is not.  The issues invovled in this process of going from sensations to perceps, for Ayn Rand, was therefore not an issue for philosophy but for the biological sciences.

My knowledge of German indicates that the concept vernunft also invovles judgement and I suspect that this is what Kant was trying to avoid.

I meant ". . . is automated in the adult," and not ". . . was automated in the adult."

Incidently, Hal, Objectivists consider it disrespectful to refer to Ayn Rand as "Rand."

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My knowledge of German indicates that the concept vernunft also invovles judgement and I suspect that this is what Kant was trying to avoid.

I am at the prekindergarten level in studying Kant. I have a bunch of questions.

First, rather than avoiding judgement, was not Kant focusing his three "Critiques" on a study of judgement of one type or another? For example, was not the purpose of Critique of Pure Reason the dissection of the nature, origin and conditions of theoretical judgements?

A judgement, apparently, was for Kant a proposition (declarative sentence) that makes a statement about something. For instance, a theoretical judgement, in CPR at B141-142, seems to be a statement about a fact (an "is"), but in the Critique of Practical Reason he wrote about judgement of value (an "ought"). (I am getting this from Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, p. 267, "judgement.") An example of a "theoretical judgement" would be: Bodies are heavy.

Second, how would Kant have defined logic, in contrast to Ayn Rand's definition as the art of noncontradictory identification? Did he see logic as only a collection of rules for making syllogistic inferences? Or did "logic" encompass all the three "Critiques" and more?

Third, what did "reason" mean to Kant? Did he offer a definition? (Yeah, I know his writing style was atrocious, even worse than Bridget's, and so we can't expect a neat, concise formulation, I suppose.)

Was it a faculty or a process? If either, then what faculty or what process?

If I have time, perhaps I can try to further access Critique of Pure Reason or secondary sources, in trying to answer my own questions, if no one else does.

P. S. -- I do not read German. I have been told by those who do that German writers capitalize the first letter of nouns -- such as Vernunft ("reason")? Is that correct? Is that to distinguish nouns from other parts of speech that have the same spelling?

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Ayn Rand's conceptualizing of all this, as best as I presently understand, is that the process of going from sensations to percepts was automated in the adult, and non-automated for the pre-conceptual infant.  By non-automated I here mean that the infant is aware of discrete sensations at the pre-perceptual level.  The adult is not.  The issues invovled in this process of going from sensations to perceps, for Ayn Rand, was therefore not an issue for philosophy but for the biological sciences.

You could certainly argue that the specific details regarding how humans actually go about synthesising sensations in practice is an issue for biology and child psychology, but Kant's concern with the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience in general do seem to fall firmly into the philosoophical category since they are intimately tied to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. For instance, one of Kant's insights was that our understanding of concepts (I use the word 'concept' here in the Kantian sense, which is not directly equivalent to the sense in which Rand used the term) such as 'object' or 'entity' must in some sense be a priori - they cannot be derived from experience alone, because unless we already had the concept of 'object', we couldn't experience them at all - we would only experience unrelated sensations. There seems to be no way to move from a series of disjoint images into the perception of an object as a unity unless you already possess, in some way, the idea of an object. Similar arguments apply to ideas such as the 'self' - it doesnt make sense to say that we derive our concept of the self purely from experience (although our explicit formation of it certainly comes from analysing what we implicitly do anyway) since as Hume pointed out, the 'self' is not given in experience, only a series of disjoint mental states. The fact that we DO manage to form an idea of the self despite this (ie the fact that passage from the sensual level to the perceptual level is actually possible) seems to imply certain things about the structure of human knowledge and the mind, and this formed the basis for Kant's attack on naive Humean empiricism. Issues such as these are definitely philosophical and I can't think of how a scientific investigation of them would even be possible.

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I don't have a copy of the Critique handy, but I'll do the best I can off the top of my head.

First, rather than avoiding judgement, was not Kant focusing his three "Critiques" on a study of judgement of one type or another? For example, was not the purpose of Critique of Pure Reason the dissection of the nature, origin and conditions of theoretical judgements?
Yes, in a sense the Critiques were about judgements, but more about the necessary conditions for these judgements to be possible. Kant was primarilly interested in HOW we are able to do what we do - ie what epistemic conditions must be satisfied in order for the possibility of judgements to even exist.

A judgement, apparently, was for Kant a proposition (declarative sentence)
No I think this is too narrow; it sounds more like logical positivism than Kant.

Second, how would Kant have defined logic, in contrast to Ayn Rand's definition as the art of noncontradictory identification? Did he see logic as only a collection of rules for making syllogistic inferences? Or did "logic" encompass all the three "Critiques" and more?
Kant subdivided logic into several categories. What he called 'pure' logic was essentially the traditional interpretation of Aristotlean syllogistic logic, which was concerned with the abstract study of forms - ie what is left after abstracting away all the particular characteristics of objects. He believed that 'pure' logic. as a science, was essentially complete. However he also wanted to develop what he called "Transcendental Logic" in order to address the questions which were of interest to him. Transcendental logic does not abstract all qualities from objects in the sense which 'pure' logic does; it abstracts away all their empirical qualities, but leaves behind what Kant called their 'transcendental' qualities (ie the necessary form they must have in order for our experiences of them to be possible)

The closest thing Kant recognised to Rand's "non-contradictory identification" would be what he called "applied logic". I'm unsure how to best explain the distinction Kant makes between pure and applied logic, but I think the best way is so say that 'pure' logic is ENTIRELY general - it is not restricted to humans, but would apply to ANY being in the universe capable of thought. Applied logic on the other hand would be logic 'for humans' - ie one that takes into account the specifics of human consciousness and mental processes, such as their memory and other cognitive functions. In a sense, applied logic would be an outline of the best way for humans to reason, although I'm not sure that Kant would have used this terminology. I think that Rand's definition of logic would almost certainly have been subsumed by Kant under 'applied logic', but applied logic wasnt something Kant was particularly concerned with in the first critique and I havent read any other of his works, so I could be wrong.

In addition to all this, Kant believed that every particular science, has its own specialised logic which is concerned with the specific objects which it studied. Pure logic would be, in a sense, a generalisation of these 'specialised' logics, although again I doubt Kant would have used this terminology.

In summary:

GENERAL LOGIC
 Pure logic - abstracts away all conditions of objects
 Applied logic - deals with the cognitive function of humans; "how should we reason"

PARTICULAR LOGIC
 The logic of a particular science. Will vary depending on the objects investigated y that science

TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC
 Abstracts away all empirical qualities of objects, but leaves behind those contributed by the understanding (their transcendental qualities)[/code]

He also went on to make several more subdivisions, such as 'analytic' vs 'dialectic' logic, although I believe that this was the convention of the time rather than being an innovation of Kant's (not 100% sure about this).

Whatever else can be said about Kant, he certainly had a methodological mind.

Third, what did "reason" mean to Kant? Did he offer a definition? (Yeah, I know his writing style was atrocious, even worse than Bridget's, and so we can't expect a neat, concise formulation, I suppose.)
Again, Kant tended to subdivide Reason into different types, each limited to its own sphere. The Critique of Pure Reason outlined what he described as 'pure' reason, and the Critique of Practical Reason does the same for his 'practical' reason. I seem to remember him defining both terms in the preface to the first critique but as I said I don't have a copy handy; I'll dig it out when I get home.

If I have time, perhaps I can try to further access [i]Critique of Pure Reason[/i] or secondary sources, in trying to answer my own questions, if no one else does.
I would recommend Henry Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism" if you were interested in reading Kant (I'd probably recommend it instead of reading the actual Critique to be honest; Kant's prose is appalling). It's not an outline of the Critique but rather an interpretation, and one which I found a lot more defensible than most traditional works of Kant "scholarship".

P. S. -- I do not read German. I have been told by those who do that German writers capitalize the first letter of nouns -- such as [i]Vernunft [/i]("reason")? Is that correct? Is that to distinguish nouns from other parts of speech that have the same spelling?
Yes I think that's correct. although I don't speak German either so I'm not 100% sure. Often they get translated into English still capitalised, which is why oddities such as 'Being' and 'the Other' tend to feature a lot in continental philosophy.
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[...] Yes, in a sense the Critiques were about judgements, but more about the necessary conditions for these judgements to be possible. [...]

Transcendental logic does not abstract all qualities from objects in the sense which 'pure' logic does; it abstracts away all their empirical qualities, but leaves behind what Kant called their 'transcendental' qualities (ie the necessary form they must have in order for our experiences of them to be possible)[...]

First, thank you for your comments. You have a lot of skill in ...

(1) faithfully using Kant's terminology (which I recognize from dragging myself through an English translation of Critique of Pure Reason once);

and at the same time ...

(2) presenting his ideas clearly (which he almost never did in CPR, unless he had a philosophical punch line to deliver).

In the quotation above, I boldfaced terms which together have always presented a puzzle to me when reading Kant and even reading fairly clear commentators on Kant. I hardly even know how to phrase my question.

The problem is Kant's frequent use of the term possible (in the English translation). I can't figure out whether the term is simply unneeded for meaning and just put in for rhetorical emphasis, or whether it names some particular and important meaning I don't grasp, or even whether it hints at some much wider system of thought hanging in the background.

For example, why would he talk about possible experience rather than simply experience? What is he telling the reader by saying possible?

Often appearing in conjunction with (or in juxtaposition to?) possible is necessary. Is this term necessary the same as in the necessary vs. contingent dichotomy? If so, does possible mean the same as contingent? It doesn't seem to, but I am unsure.

I also sense in CPR that what I call the River of Dichotomies runs straight from the ancient world into Kantland: analytic vs. synthetic, theoretical vs. practical, necessary vs. contingent, pure vs. practical, formal vs. empirical, and probably others.

This dichotomizing seems particularly strong in CPR, though individually the particular dichotomies all seem traditional. I wonder if this flood of dichotomizing is part of the kaleidoscope effect one gets from "reading" CPR. I noticed in reading CPR, which purports to limit reason (Vernunft) to make room for faith/belief (Glaube) that one of Kant's gimmicks (excuse me, techniques) is to divide, divide, divide, and divide again. The reader ends up with a view of consciousness akin to a smashed windshield.

Comment?

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P. S. -- I do not read German. I have been told by those who do that German writers capitalize the first letter of nouns -- such as Vernunft ("reason")? Is that correct? Is that to distinguish nouns from other parts of speech that have the same spelling?

All nouns in German are capitalized.

Now I have a question for you.

What happened to your earlier suggestion that we should focus on her writings on this thread? Why is Kant's concept Vernunft suddenly relevent and Aristotle's Categories not?

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I dont think he's talking about necessity as opposed to contingency in the contexts you mention, although he does use it in that way as well at points. I generally agree with Peikoff that the necessary/contingency distinction is flawed, but Kant accepted it and it does feature in his work quite often, particularly when he discusses mathematics and logic.

A being a necessary condition for B means that B cannot occur without A. For instance, the television being turned on is a necessary condition for you watching the basketball game. When Kant talks about the "necessary conditions" for experience, he means those things that have to be true in order for us to actually have the experiences we have. For instance, in order for it be possible for someone to see a table, he must have some kind of receptivity to sense-data. In order for it to be possible for an object to understand arithmetic, it must have a mind (sorry, these examples are pretty bad but I couldnt think of any better ones).

Kant wants to talk about what is necessary for the possibility of experience in general - ie what conditions have to be satisfied in order for us to perceive the world in the way which we do. Its a fact that we DO perceive certain things in certain ways (for instance we see objects AS objects rather than as series of discrete images and we also have clear knowledge about concepts such as casuality, which Hume showed could not have arisen from experience alone), and Kant tried to investigate what this implies about the structure of our cognition, and about knowledge in general.

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The closest thing Kant recognised to Rand's "non-contradictory identification" would be what he called "applied logic". I'm unsure how to best explain the distinction Kant makes between pure and applied logic, but I think the best way is so say that 'pure' logic is ENTIRELY general - it is not restricted to humans, but would apply to ANY being in the universe capable of thought.

Oh, I think I'm beginning to understand Kant now. He wanted to have a type of logic that could be used by all beings in the universe that would be capable of thought. Do you mean, for instance, green Gremlins on Mars perhaps?

My, my. I should have paid closer attention to all my German professors in College when we studied Kant. I now find myself totally incapable of dealing with the possibility of conversing with those green Gremlins on Mars when I get there.:D

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Oh, I think I'm beginning to understand Kant now.  He wanted to have a type of logic that could be used by all beings in the universe that would be capable of thought.  Do you mean, for instance, green Gremlins on Mars perhaps?
Im unsure what your point is. Logic in those days was believed to be universal by pretty much all scholars, not just Kant. As far as I know Aristotle himself thought this; its hard to imagine him claiming that, if conscious life exists somewhere else in the universe, then "All As are B; x is A therefore x is B" could somehow be false for them. I'm not sure that assertion would even make sense.

Logic remained relatively static from Aristotle up to Frege, so Kant's view that the logic of his time was both complete and universal is certainly understandable (I use the term 'logic' here in the traditional way, not to mean "the art of non-contradictory identification").

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Oh, I think I'm beginning to understand Kant now.  He wanted to have a type of logic that could be used by all beings in the universe that would be capable of thought.  Do you mean, for instance, green Gremlins on Mars perhaps?

Well, actually yes. In my preliminary reading of Critique of Pure Reason and reading Manfred Kuehn's Kant: A Biography, I have seen evidence -- I do not have the page numbers handy -- for the very thing you mention. Kant does allude to "other rational beings" who might or might not use the "logic" of theoretical reason which he was critiquing.

Does that seem bizarre? Sure does. But it fits perfectly with Immanuel Kant. In his earlier academic years he was noted for the erudition and entertainment of his lectures on traveling to far-away places -- to none of which he had ever gone. (He barely left Konigsberg during the 80 years of his life.) Commensurate with that, he -- according to Kuehn -- did believe that there are intelligent beings on other planets in the universe. He offered no evidence for their existence, except -- if I recall correctly -- as a "possibility." Now, that is rationalism.

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What happened to your earlier suggestion that we should focus on her writings on this thread?  Why is Kant's concept Vernunft suddenly relevent and Aristotle's Categories not?

I have no objection to contrasting Ayn Rand's concept of logic (or reason, which is closely tied to logic) to the most closely related concepts of other philosophers. My objection was to doing a reading of other documents in this thread -- whether Aristotle's or Ayn Rand's or any philosopher's.

If you believe that Aristotle's concept of logic will help illuminate Ayn Rand's, then by all means offer it for study.

What was Aristotle's concept of logic?

How does it differ, if it does, from Ayn Rand's?

The way to answer these historical questions, ultimately, is to reference specific passages in specific texts as evidence.

As I mentioned, if we are approaching this issue philosophically, then we don't need any texts. We need only observe (including introspection) and think.

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