Dussel wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Dussel wrote:
If critical question are raised say that the truth is of so "high order" (or any other phrase) that the critics can't understand it and it is "beyond" rational thinking.
That kind of intellectual schmutz is readily cleaned up with Karl Popper's philosophical soap.
Sir Francis Bacon did here the most of the work. David Hume and Immanuel Kant cleaned up the rest; Sir Karl did the polishing.
Kant had a bogus philosophy. There is no such thing as a necessary synthetic a priori judgment. The only necessarily true propositions are analytic, i.e. true by definition. Any proposition requiring empirically confirmation is not necessarily true. If a synthetic proposition is true, it it is true contingently. It just so happens to be the case etc. etc. Anything that is true in every possible world is analytic and tells us nothing factual about
this world.
Kant said Euclidean Geometry was true synthetic a priori. When he wrote that non-Euclidean geometry had been discovered. Conclusion: Kant goes down in flames. Kant said that Newtonian Physics is true synthetic a priori. We now know Newtonian Physics is false. Newton's physics is Galilean invariant and we know by experiment that the world is locally Lorentzian invariant. Again, Kant goes down in flames. There is a very simple rule. If a theory implies a conclusion that is falsified experimentally, one of the premises of the theory is false. In short the theory is wrong since it follows from the logical conjunction of its premises.
As to Hume, he and Hobbes are my philosophical heroes.
Hume's only sin was to drive Kant mad, whereupon Kant inflicted the Critique of Pure Reason on an unsuspecting world.
ruveyn