On 1/2/2013 at 12:23 PM, Boydstun said:
. . . However many ties he made between sensing and thinking, he [Kant] deepened and hardened the divide between them. . . .
One remark of Rand’s on the history of philosophy in her title essay of FNI had long puzzled me. Having argued that Rationalists and Empiricists from Descartes to Hume had reached a standoff opposition, each discounting a major part of what goes into human cognition, an opposition that replicated in new form an ancient opposition between Witchdoctor and Attila, (two psychological archetypes); she says of Kant, who had arrived on the heels of that Rationalist/Empiricist battle: “The man who formalized this state, and closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant.”
Rand’s ensuing paragraphs on Kant’s philosophy, theoretical and moral, worked to fit his philosophy into perpetuating Witchdoctor-Attila alliance in rule of the world and into preparing potent poison for development of a system of philosophy, taking off from leads of Aristotle, that could succeed as backing and liberating the modern human mind, spirit, and being in its scientific and existential progress. But the only thing I could see in Kant that in a way sealed specifically the divide between Rationalism and Empiricism was Kant’s division between sense and understanding (notwithstanding his way [wrong way] of bringing them smoothly together).
I looked into the history of philosophy books Rand had opened, and I found no portraits of Kant’s philosophy in its affinities and contrasts with Rationalism and with Empiricism that saw Kant as somehow formalizing or making impassable the divide between Rationalism and Empiricism. Perhaps Rand came to this facet of Kant’s relation to those two traditions preceding him on her own. But I’ve recently come across a take similar to Rand’s in John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), a work Leonard Peikoff was using in composing his Ph.D. dissertation in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s. (His advisor was Sidney Hook, who was a champion of Dewey.) Whether or not Rand got a peek at this passage from Dewey, here it is for comparison with Rand’s point.
“‘Suggestions’ [preliminary inklings for ideas possibly productive for solution of a problem] have received scant courtesy in logical theory. It is true that when they just ‘pop into our heads’, because of the workings of the psycho-physical organism, they are not logical. But they are both the conditions and the primary stuff of logical ideas. The traditional empiristic theory reduced them, as has already been pointed out, to mental copies of physical things and assumed that they were per se identical with ideas. Consequently it ignored the function of ideas in directing observation and in ascertaining relevant facts. The rationalistic school, on the other hand, saw clearly that ‘facts’ apart from ideas are trivial, that they acquire import and significance only in relation to ideas. But at the same time it failed to attend to the operative and functional nature of the latter. Hence, it treated ideas as equivalent to the ultimate structure of ‘Reality’. The Kantian formula that apart from each other ‘perceptions are blind and conceptions empty’ marks a profound logical insight. The insight, however, was radically distorted because perceptual and conceptual contents were supposed to originate from different sources and thus required a third activity, that of synthetic understanding, to bring them together. In logical fact, perceptual and conceptual materials are instituted in functional correlativity with each other, in such a manner that the former locates and describes the problem while the latter represents a possible method of solution. Both are determinations in and by inquiry of the original problematic situation whose pervasive quality controls their institution and their contents. Both are finally checked by their capacity to work together to introduce a resolved unified situation. As distinctions they represent logical divisions of labor.” (114–15)
I’ll explain shortly Dewey’s technical terms of situation, problem, idea, and inquiry over in the thread on OPAR,* where I’m including a comparison of Dewey 1938 and Peikoff’s OPAR concerning conceptions of logic and proof.