Thursday, September 27, 2007

Assignment #2.

The red tinted glasses is a metaphor for how our reason and knowledge, opinion and experience, time and space limits what we can experience - as empiricists argue, and how we may believe that the things we experience through these constraints are the whole truth - as rationalists argue. An example would be how one raised in an environment where they have never experienced a snake would believe, due to a snake's appearance, that it is slimy and repulsive and think of this as the truth, but as anyone who has any remote knowledge about snakes or have touched one would say that snakes' skin is, in fact, dry and scaly, unlike the previous person would've thought.

However, can we ever transcend the barrier of human concepts and experience the universe as it truely is?

Kant's theory implies that humans are eternally oblivious to everything that is happening around them, even with the advent of science, because even though it seemingly explains (or tries to) even the most unconceivable of phenomena, it is still limited to the human concepts of time and space, and even as we take in the knowledge that is fed to us as scientific concepts, these concepts are merely concepts, opinion, knowledge of others, and therefore we aren't taking off a pair of tinted glasses, we are merely adding more shades to the tint.

1 comment:

michelleyam said...

Hi Lawrence!

I agree with you that "we aren't taking off a pair of tinted glasses, we are merely adding more shades to the tint."

Your reasoning compliments mine because we both believe that our vision is limited with our previous experience, opinions of others and knowledge.