> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction - Where Did It Go? Kant completed the *Critique of Pure Reason* in 1781. He had been woken from his dogmatic slumber by Hume's attack on the metaphysical nature of causes and their effects. Hume suggested that there was nothing that glued causes and effects other than habit. There was nothing logically necessary about the sun rising tomorrow. Habit leads us to believe that it will do so, as it has always done so in the past. Kant realized that we can describe space as both continuous and discrete, and good arguments could be made for both, but that they were contradictory. The contradictions come about because we assume that space and time are fundamentally real, rather than constructed by our minds. He called these paradoxes *antinomies*. ### Chapter 2 - A Brief History of this Very Instant Zeno identified a profound paradox in life. For something to change, there must be something underlying it that is unchanging. So the paradox lies in the fact that reality seems to be both divisible and indivisible. Diogenes the Cynic refuted him by getting up and walking. Aristotle refuted him by saying that we are confusing potential divisibility with actual divisibility. Kant took Zeno's insight and brought more precision to it. He believed that the antinomies (paradoxes) of reason are signs that we are taking the tools of reason too far. > ... The antinomies that erupt when we follow our very natural tendencies and desires and turn into eternal idols the tools reason gave us to make sense of the here and now. Kant got really upset with Swedenborg, who claimed he could speak to spirits. Kant believed this was an unjustified extrapolation of our experience of selfhood into realms beyond experience. Heisenberg pointed out that you need an observer for change to happen, as the observer plays the role of the fixed unchanging thing that sees other things in relationship to each other. ### Chapter 6 - In the Blink of an Eye # Quotes