Reviews for 2000 Import and Export Market for Civil Engineering and Contracting Buildings and Equipment ...

The average rating for 2000 Import and Export Market for Civil Engineering and Contracting Buildings and Equipment ... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-05-04 00:00:00 PAUL BEDARD Hieroglyphics: A Reluctant Translation The Prolegomena is valuable as a summarization that is intended to be less obscure and suited for popular consumption. It tries to compress Kant’s criticism of (all) previous work in metaphysics and the theory of knowledge -- first propounded in the Critique of Pure Reason, which provided a comprehensive response to early modern philosophy and a starting point for most subsequent work in philosophy. A note on the Edition: This is a wonderful edition to approach the Prolegomena with -- meticulous introductory essay and copious notes. Plus it comes with a summary outline of all the sections! A summary of a summary. What more could you want? Summing up the Beast As is well known The Critique of Pure Reason is a notoriously difficult work. When first published, the early readers were not very different from modern readers — they found it incomprehensible! Kant was a poor popularizer of his own work and when it was finally published in the spring of 1781 (with Kant nearing 57), after almost ten years of preparation and work, Kant had expected that the evident originality of the thoughts would attract immediate attention, at least among philosophers. He was… well… to be disappointed — for the first year or two he received from those whom he most expected to give his book a sympathetic hearing only a cool and uncomprehending, if not bewildered, silence. What else would you expect for such wild intentions: My intention is to convince all of those who find it worthwhile to occupy themselves with metaphysics that it is unavoidably necessary to suspend their work for the present, to consider all that has happened until now as if it had not happened, and before all else to pose the question: “whether such a thing as metaphysics is even possible at all.” He had proposed a “Copernican Revolution” in thinking. He should have known that such stuff cannot come without a user manual. Soon Kant caught on to this, and started having some misgivings about the fact that he was clearly not getting the reception he had expected for his masterpiece: Kant is known to have written to Herz expressing his discomfort in learning that the eminent philosopher Moses Mendelssohn had “laid my book aside,” since he felt that Mendelssohn was “the most important of all the people who could explain this theory to the world.” Mendelssohn later wrote to a friend confessing that he did not understand the work, and professing pleasure at learning that, in the opinion of her brother, he would not be “missing much” if he continued not to understand it! Kant’s colleague in Konigsberg, Johann Schultz, in the preface to his 1784 Exposition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, mentioned the “nearly universal complaint about the unconquerable obscurity and unintelligibility” of the work, saying that for the largest part of the learned public it was “as if it consisted in nothing but hieroglyphics.” As a reaction to this lack of public appreciation for such a vital work that was to have "brought about a complete change of thinking," a great deal of Kant's effort during the decade of the 1780s had diverted away from further development of his system and towards the unforeseen task of clarifying the critical foun­dations of his system of philosophy that he thought he had completed in May 1781. This work took a number of different forms: the publica­tion of a brief defense and attempted popularization of the Critique in 1783 until, finally, Kant came to think that an overview would be of great value to aid the reading public in comprehending the implications of the Critique. The Prolegomena was the result. We can only guess what more productive use could have been made of this period! It is sometimes obvious in this work that Kant was pained by the need to summarize his great work (and with the necessity of expending valuable time on it). Only someone who has written an elaborate masterpiece would know how difficult it must be to write a summary of it. And Kant lets it slip often enough (one might even think deliberately) that he is not too amused by having to do so: But although a mere plan that might precede the Critique of Pure Reason would be unintelligible, undependable, and useless, it is by contrast all the more useful if it comes after. For one will thereby be put in the position to survey the whole, to test one by one the main points at issue in this science, and to arrange many things in the exposition better than could be done in the first execution of the work. Whosoever finds this plan itself, which I send ahead as prolegomena for any future metaphysics, still obscure, may consider that it simply is not necessary for everyone to study metaphysics; and that in such a case one should apply one’s mental gifts to another object. That whosoever undertakes to judge or indeed to construct a metaphysics must, however, thoroughly satisfy the challenge made here, whether it happens that they accept my solution, or fundamentally reject it and replace it with another – for they cannot dismiss it; and finally, that the much decried obscurity (a familiar cloaking for one’s own indolence or dimwittedness) has its use as well, since everybody, who with respect to all other sciences observes a wary silence, speaks master- fully, and boldly passes judgment in questions of metaphysics, because here to be sure their ignorance does not stand out clearly in relation to the science of others, but in relation to genuine critical principles, which therefore can be praised. Kant hoped to hit more than one bird with the Prolegomena: It was meant to offer “preparatory exercises” to the Critique of Pure Reason — not meant to replace the Critique, but as “preparatory exercises” they were intended to be read prior to the longer work. It was also meant to give an overview of that work, in which the structure and plan of the whole work could be more starkly put across — offered “as a general synopsis, with which the work itself could then be compared on occasion”. The Prolegomena are to be taken as a plan, synopsis, and guide for the Critique of Pure Reason. He also wanted to walk his readers through the major arguments following the “analytic” method of exposition (as opposed to the “synthetic” method of the Critique): a method that starts from some given proposition or body of cognition and seeks principles from which it might be derived, as opposed to a method that first seeks to prove the principles and then to derive other propositions from them (pp. 13, 25–6). What this means is that Kant realized that most of the readers were dazed by his daring to start the Critique from a scary emptiness of knowledge from which he set out to construct the very foundations on which any possible structure of knowledge can stand, and also the possibility of such a foundation i.e metaphysics. There he proceeds from these first (newly derived) principles of the theory of knowledge to examine the propositions that might be derived from it that are adaptable to a useful metaphysics. In the Prolegomena, Kant reverses this and takes the propositions (i.e structure) as a given and then seeks to expose the required foundations that are needed to support such a construction. This he feels is less scary for the uninitiated reader. It is true. The abyss is not so stark when viewed through this approach, and we can ease into our fall! Kant’s work is easy to summarize (well, not really — but enough work has been put into it that at there least it is easy to get good summaries) but is infinitely rich with potential for the inquisitive reader. This reviewer has no intention of summarizing and thus reducing a method/system to its mere conclusions. And to summarize the method would be to recreate it in full detail! Instead the only advice tendered would be to explore Kant’s work in depth and not rest content with a superficial understanding of only the conclusions. That is precisely what Kant criticizes (in the appendix to the Prolegomena) his reviewers of doing back in the day. We should know better by now.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-04 00:00:00 Eddie O Grady 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...