Adaptive Structures and Materials Systems Presented at the 1998 Asme International Mechanica... Book

My object is to persuade all those who think metaphysics worth studying that it is absolutely necessary to pause a moment and, disregarding all that has been done, to propose first the preliminary question, "Whether such a thing as metaphysics be at all possible?"

If it is a science, how does it happen that it cannot, like other sciences, obtain universal and permanent recognition? If not, how can it maintain its pretensions, and keep the human understanding in suspense with hopes never ceasing, yet never fulfilled? Whether then we demonstrate our knowledge or our ignorance in this field, we must come once and for all to a definite conclusion respecting the nature of this so-called science, which cannot possibly remain on its present footing. It seems almost ridiculous, while every other science is continually advancing, that in this, which pretends to be wisdom incarnate, for whose oracle every one inquires, we should constantly move around the same spot, without gaining a single step. And so its followers having melted away, we do not find that men confident of their ability to shine in other sciences venture their reputation here, where everybody, however ignorant in other matters, presumes to deliver a final verdict, inasmuch as in this domain there is as yet no standard weight and measure to distinguish soundness from shallow talk. With the completion of this essaying piece by the remarkably ideal Königsberger, I have, more or less, put paid to my desire to read Kant without having gained any degree of comprehension commensurate with the amount of time I have put in. This is not in any way the fault of Kant—I am simply not constituted to be a philosopher of higher rank than one who pinches just enough off of the cerebrally sound edifice to be able to pretend towards parleying its contours and construct. It was actually rather fun trying to grasp the message, and coevally disheartening to discover that, heading into the greying era, my mental faculties are too slippery and scabrous to be able to accomplish such. Still, it's worth a bit of gabbling about, if only because there are probably sufficient people about who don't get the dude any better, and hence would be uncomfortable with boldly proclaiming that this emperor, having finally managed egress from the water closet, is sashaying about desnudo.

It was definitely an easier reading experience than The Critique of Pure Reason, but still a difficult row to hoe throughout: it would also prove most helpful to the prospective philosophical explorer if she forearmed herself with a passable knowledge of the Kantian lexicon. The ways in which Kant expresses his proofs of Time and Space being pure forms of intuition strike me as brilliant—irrefutable to a plebhead such as myself, while his processed discursion upon how judgments of experience arise from a priori conceptual superadditions to judgments of perception, while somewhat tortuous, yet, in toto, elucidates his thought schema potently. I really do need to devour such as the appendix to Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, that I might understand why the Critical Philosophy was fated to being considered such a knackered perspective in days like ours: it is my opinion that his Transcendental Idealism—in which objective legislation proves a participatory process involving both sides of that great, perduring, and confounding philosophic divide—is one of the more tenable thought schematics I've encountered, though admittedly dry as dust and lacking tangible tenterhooks sunk into such modern unearthing as that of the subconscious. Yet it sensibly endows the sensibly-derived with sole knowledgeable potential; smartly refutes the uber-scepticism of When-Empiricism-Attacks; promotes the individual as processor of encompassed reality whilst placing her within a universal framework of laws and forms; respects the conundrums and paradoxical sky-hooks of the infinite and absolute by admitting its potential whilst denying its sussing (though it is in this, I believe, that Schopey found the rot settling in); and sorts intangible and ephemeral cognitive processes into logically-derived and -defensible categories that were subsequently shoe-horned into fascinating aesthetic and moral mental loafers—all whilst keeping God's essence simultaneously alive and fully under the thumb of his mortal progenitors and, hence, well away from dangerous far-faring amongst the occluded thickets of any metaphysical wood.

That the Neo-Kantians have taken it to extremes, as seems the wont of all such en-prefixed progeny, fails to detract from the inspired way in which the originator separated the noumenal from the phenomenal once and for all within the parlous halls of knowing, while yet leaving room for the former to be potentially explored in non-epistemological manners and memes courtesy of the malachite bridges set down and forth to span those in-itself waters. Indeed, I always hold in mind the fact that Abraham Pais spoke of the great physicist Niels Bohr as being the natural successor to Kant, what with the latter's concept of complementarity, of a synthesis of reasoning mind with sensibly plenitudinous but transcendentally unknowable nature, meshing rather nicely in parts with the former's Copenhagen-backed postulation of Quantum Reality. Once again, it's little fault reflected upon Kant that so many have failed to heed the purely prudent (if unsettling) limits which he so carefully erected in the post-Enlightenment crush, what with reasonableness lacking the excitement and aesthetic soloing a world in flux importunely demands...