PREVIEW-Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?

0:00 Wes: This is a Partially Examined Life episode Preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at 1.7 head on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it actually saying guys there I had to pause because it's not all guys today. Our question for episode 19 is what can we know With a discussion of Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics? For a link to that text discussion and other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Seth: This is Seth Paskin from Austin, Texas.

0:54 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:56 Azura: And this is Azzurra Crispino, also in Austin, Texas.

0:59 Mark: So yes, we have a guest. Azzurra, why are you here?

1:04 Azura: Why am I here? That's a very tough question to ask on a general level, especially in a philosophy podcast, but I guess I can answer sort of the little question of why am I here? Which is that Seth had asked one of our mutual friends, Sarah Binion, for someone who would be willing to speak on feminist issues here on this podcast, and then somehow that turned into me speaking on Kant, which I'm not really

1:28 Mark: sure what to make of because Kant is kind of a girly man, that's all. So Azzurra, one thing that was interesting about you, among many, but that we actually discussed a little, was your job. So Azzurra does teach, but maybe has a career path that we have not previously talked about as being an option.

1:46 Azura: Yes, that's true. So I'm an associate professor of philosophy at a community college here in Austin. Austin Community College. So what that means is that although I technically qualify as a philosopher in the sense that I am a member of the American Philosophical association, probably most people in academia wouldn't consider me as such for the simple reason that I primarily have a job that involves teaching. So most of what I do is educate America about philosophical concerns. Or maybe they just stare at me blank eyed. I still haven't quite figured that one out.

But what's nice about my job is that I pretty much get to teach whatever I want and teaching is the focus. So unlike a lot of people in the philosophy tradition, I don't have the publish or perish concern. But what I miss is the chance to talk philosophy with other people, which is why I was really excited about the opportunity to sit and talk with you guys.

2:38 Mark: Yeah, we're happy to have you and you get to live somewhere cool. Right. You're in Austin. Whereas if you're pursuing like the straight research, tenure track thing, at least, typically, at least most of the people we went to school with who got jobs, like some of them are in, like Idaho and North Dakota and places that

2:54 Wes: one might not choose, one might not to rag on. Those places. They're wonderful.

3:00 Mark: Yes, to rag on those places.

3:04 Azura: It is pretty cool that I'm in Austin.

3:06 Seth: Hey, just on that subject of one guy I went to college with who was subsequently a Rhodes scholar and then went and got his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, is just now coming up for tenure consideration at the University of Montana.

3:22 Mark: Woohoo.

3:23 Seth: So if that tells you anything about the state of. His name's Paul Minch, one of the smartest, nicest guys I ever knew. And Pittsburgh is obviously a top class program. And he was a Rhodes scholar and he went to Reed College, where I went to. And only now is he being considered for tenure at the University of Montana. That tells you something about the state of the industry right now. But he likes it there. That's not a comment on Montana.

3:44 Mark: I thought Montana outlawed book larning.

3:46 Seth: You know, they just don't allow book learning without hunting. All professors are required to hunt moose, deer, grizzly.

3:55 Mark: All right, some ground rules for our discussion which we state at the beginning of these things to mock and frustrate our listeners. Number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. Though you may want to listen to the two episodes just before this, particularly the one on Hume, Although I'm sure we'll talk about Plato a little bit as well. Number two, no gratuitous name dropping. We are interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. We have a point to make. We'll just make it. And not say, for instance, you would understand me if only you had read theaetetus's treatise.

What I should have said. Number three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case we're not doing so. Seems like it would be more entertaining. And number four, that I'm adding special for this time, just based on how things went last time. Although I got the idea from this from. It's a standard American Philosophical association thing. Let Seth talk about what he wants to talk about. So he's not sad. A sad Seth makes for, well, entertainment, but.

4:57 Seth: Oh my. Oh my God. I can't believe.

5:01 Azura: Well, Seth, this might cheer you up. I don't know if you're aware that yesterday would have been David Hume's 299th birthday.

5:09 Seth: Wow, I was not aware of that.

5:10 Azura: Doesn't that cheer you up?

5:12 Seth: It does. It does remind me too, that I have not been getting my Facebook updates from the philosophy group that I belong to. That usually tells me everybody's anniversaries, but for some reason I haven't been getting them, otherwise I would have known. But now I'm a Kantian. After reading Kant, I've decided I'm a Kantian, so. How about that?

5:29 Wes: Sweet.

5:30 Seth: Yes, people can change.

5:31 Mark: I decided that some of my objections to Kant had to do with confusions, but I still disagree with most of the steps of his argument.

5:39 Wes: The steps.

5:40 Seth: Well, then this should make for an entertaining evening.

5:42 Mark: I have quibbles. All right, Wes, why don't you start us on the micro summary?

5:47 Wes: Okay, this is probably going to be muddled as usual, but I'll try. So Hume's. I mean, Kant's starting point is Hume.

5:55 Mark: Nice start. But

5:58 Wes: his starting point is Hume's skepticism, which we discussed in a previous podcast. And that skepticism concerns causality. For Hume, the basic criticism was that we gain all our knowledge through sense, impressions and causality, which is essential to the idea of science isn't something that comes in through the sen. Senses. It's not like color or there's no sensory organ which kind of sucks in causality. So the problem with that is that it sort of undermines the. There's a certain seeming necessity to causality. So there's. That kind of Skepticism undermines science insofar as objectivity requires these universal laws which seem necessary for Hume.

In fact, it's just custom. One event follows another, and we can't say objectively that one causes another. Alright, so Kant finds that very impressive, that critique, but he thinks that in a way it goes much farther and there's lots of elaborations to be made on it. And that's really what he wants to do. One of the problems with Hume's skepticism, Kant thinks, is that it applies much more generally than Hume realized. It applies not just to causality, but to a whole host of other, what he calls categories of connections between phenomena. And it would apply just as much to geometric and arithmetic knowledge as well.

And the reason why Kant thinks that is that he thinks geometry and arithmetic, for instance, are what he calls synthetic meaning. Just in the same way that causes join two disparate phenomena and tell you something new about them, they're a relation. So mathematical knowledge is relational and synthetic in that sense. And he uses the example of seven plus five equals 12, which he takes from the Theaetetus, where it's not simply what he calls analytical, which is to say, it's not like saying that all bachelors are unmarried men, where you're simply giving a definition or simply getting at what's entailed in a concept.

7 +5 equals 12 tells us something

8:08 Mark: new, what's contained in a concept, not what's entailed.

8:11 Wes: Okay.

8:11 Mark: Because that's the difference, right?

8:13 Wes: Well, yeah, we can.

8:14 Mark: Okay.

8:15 Wes: Logical entailment, we're talking. Anyway, so it's seven plus five equals 12 is ampliative in the sense that it expands our knowledge. And we get to it with what Kant calls intuition, meaning we have to do something imaginative, like in the case of arithmetic, count on our fingers going from 7 to 12. We have to do, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on our fingers, and. And then get to this new bit of knowledge. So there are spatial and temporal intuitions that underlie mathematical knowledge. And those are at the same time synthetic or ampliative, as we've just discussed.

But they're also, Kant thinks, a priori in the sense that they have this necessity, which, as Hume noted, can't come in from the outside. Kant agrees with that. That sense of necessity can't come in from the outside. And so all objective knowledge must have an element of this a priori necessity. And yet it's synthetic as well. Why is that important? Because metaphysics, also, the big problem with metaphysics is the fact that it deals with these a priori synthetic judgments. And in a way, Hume's critique of causality is a critique of metaphysics because it's, you know, you're talking about whether God caused the world.

Taking ideas like causality as sort of metaphysically basic. You can do lots of illegitimate things with them, apply them to God and Saul, and ask all sorts of questions about those sorts of things. So the innovation for Kant is to say, well, once you've expanded Hume's skepticism from causality to everything else, you get a solution to the problem. And here he mentions Locke. So we should mention what he means when he talks about Locke's primary and secondary qualities, because that'll get us at his distinction between phenomena and things in themselves.

9:59 Mark: That's in the 32nd. Okay, go ahead.

10:02 Wes: Sorry, this is almost over. This is, like I said, so where something like Red is a secondary quality. It's a sensation. And it's thought to not be a property of things in themselves. It's, you know, for Locke, who's influenced by the scientific considerations of his day, he's thinking of color as an effect of wavelengths of light affecting hitting the eye, for instance, and creating a subjective sensation of color which has no correspondence to things in themselves outside of us, which are thought to be spatiotemporal. For Kant, everything gets sucked in.

Space and time go the way of color and other secondary qualities. And of course, Hume had done the same thing with causality that Locke had done for color. But once you get everything, let's say, inside the head to some extent, or everything is imposed by the mental faculty on reality, then you win back objectivity for Kant, meaning that things in themselves are just these inaccessible, unknown objects and we have unmediated access to what we typically think of as physical objects. And that's where you get into trouble when you think that you have access to things in themselves and you screw up and then causality just becomes custom.

Well, once the objects that we're concerned with are also, let's say, in the head to some extent, then causality and those things can apply a priori and they can be necessary, and we do get a grounds for objective knowledge. All right, I'll cut it off there. There's lots more, but that's the basic argument, I guess.

11:29 Mark: My 22nd version of that. I'll actually give a 22nd version. I think I can. Well, plus you've made it a little easier. He wants to know whether metaphysics is possible. And he looks at all these past metaphysicians like Plato and Leibniz and Descartes and their arguments for the existence of God. And he has a couple things like paradigm cases in mind, I think, like these traditional arguments of the existence of God, one of which you talked about, which is everything is a cause. So ultimately God must be the basic cause, and he reflects. Do these kind of arguments ever work?

And that's his analysis, I think, his paradigm case, why he wants to say all metaphysics. And he's very adamant about this. So this is the only kind of metaphysics he's talking about is made of these a priori synthetic truths. That is, it's examinations of our own concepts. But at the same time, it's not just, you know, the definitions, it's what logically follows from them. Which is why I didn't like you using the word entail for analytic, because he does.

12:21 Wes: No, it's not what. It's not what logically follows.

12:24 Mark: No, he says this. I don't even know the quote, but I'm using logic.

12:28 Wes: He's using logic in a different sense there. It's not what logically follows in our sense of logic, because that would be analytical.

12:35 Mark: Well, the way I understood it is it's analytic if it's actually contained in the concept. And he has this very narrow notion of what is contained in a concept in the way that we talked about a little in the Plato episode that, like, if you know what the concept is, you know what's contained in the concept. Right. If you can use the concept at all, which I had problems with last time when we talked about, you know, if I know the concept ox, does that mean I know everything gets contained in it? All right, I'm already explaining beyond the 30 seconds.

In any case, this is what he thinks that metaphysics has to be. We could argue about that. I want to argue about that. So he says if metaphysics is to be possible, we have to examine how are synthetic a priori truth possible? Because it seems like they shouldn't be. It seems like the only thing that is sort of true without having to look in the world at something else is just truth by definition. You don't have to look at the world and count all the bachelors and see if they're unmarried, because that's just the definition of bachelor. So he wants to disabuse us of that by saying, no, there.

In fact, there are a lot of these synthetic a priori truths. Here are all the types of them. Now by going through all the types of them, he gives us his view of the mind and how it's divided into these different faculties of sensibility and the understanding and reason. And if you understand why some of them work because they're associated with certain faculties and how they can go wrong, these alleged truths, by applying them to the wrong sphere. Right? If you apply things of the sensibility to the understanding, you're messing up. If you're taking categories of the understanding and applying them outside the appropriate realm of understanding, then you're messing up.

So he gives us, has chapters in here on math as one example, on this pure science, what you were just talking about, Wes, about causality is another example, and then wants to say, well, what's left after that? Well, those are the alleged truths of reason. And that's where metaphysics has to lie. And that's where it gets a little, I think, the hardest place to understand and is probably the least Talked about as far as I'm aware. Like you didn't even get that far, Wes, in your description. Right.

14:30 Wes: And no, I left off of.

14:31 Seth: And your description is now long. Twice as long as it is. Azzurra. Would you like to offer a 15 second description that turns into a three or four?

14:41 Azura: I'm afraid at this point if I offer 15 seconds, it'll be two years. One thing that I think might help the listener is to sort of construct a square. This is something where we often start when we're teaching Kant metaphysics and epistemology and just make yourself a square that has four parts and think about what does it mean for something to be analytic a priori, synthetic a priori, analytic a posteriori and synthetic a posteriori. And that might help you to be able to follow the discussion as we switch from talking about analytic a priori and synthetic a priori and so on and so forth. So if you make yourself that little

15:16 Mark: square, and in fact there will be one on the website.

15:19 Azura: Oh, okay. If there's going to be one on this website, then do you want to go ahead and describe it that way? It'll be in the same order and so on?

15:25 Mark: No, go right ahead. You do your version.

15:27 Azura: So analytic a priori propositions are going to be basically things that fall with the law of contradiction. Right. And part of the claim for Kant, as I think it was Mark said earlier, basically to say that, look, Hume didn't draw these distinctions finely enough and that's the reason why he got confused and thought the causality was something that we basically impose on the, that, you know, we can't really believe exists justifiably. But if we stick to these definitions, well, then we won't fall into Hume's trap. So synthetic a priori proposition, that's basically where we're going to spend the majority of our time today talking, I would imagine. And he gives physics and math as being examples of that. And then we have analytic a posteriori propositions which pretty much are going to remain blank. Right. I mean, I can't imagine what would be an analytic a posteriori proposition.

16:18 Seth: Nothing.

16:19 Mark: Right. A priori is prior to experience, a posteriori is after or through experience. So since analytic is true by definition, we might hear about the definition through experience. Somebody tells it to us, but that's not how we confirm an analytic truth.

16:34 Azura: Right. And then we have synthetic posteriori propositions, which is basically going to be experience broadly construed.

16:40 Seth: Actually, Wes, this is something I remembered from the previous podcast where we were talking about Hume and you did mention that for Kant, I think we were using the all bachelors are unmarried example. And you said for him that was an analytic a priori proposition. I thought it was analytic a posteriori. So let's back it up just a little bit and just kind of slow it down a little bit. So concepts can come from experience or concepts can come from reason. If they come from experience, we call them as being grounded in a posteriori or empirical. And if they come from reason, we call them a priori.

17:17 Mark: Or pure.

17:18 Seth: Or pure. Right. So the whole endeavor of the Critique of pure Reason, what Kant is trying to figure out, is whether or not it's possible to have any knowledge, interesting knowledge of the world through pure reason. We know that we get interesting knowledge of the world through our experience. In other words, a posteriori, we do get useful and interesting experiences of the world. That's where we learn things. Like Azzurra lives in Austin and Seth lives in Austin, and Mark is the father of two kids. Those are the kinds of things that we learn through our experience that are when I say interesting, what Kant calls synthetic. So you have to go out and kind of check and verify, if you will, but you're gaining something from your concept, the concept of Mark. If you know Mark, you have to go find out that he has two kids and it adds to your idea of Mark, so to speak.

18:11 Mark: Unless my name was Mark Two Kids Linsenmayer.

18:14 Seth: That is right. Unless it was contained in the concept of Mark Two Kids Linsenmayer, that he had two kids. So then you can get ideas through so called pure reason, or at least that's the question that we have. Can you gain anything interesting? Can you learn anything about the world through pure reason? And the first thing you find out is that you can learn some stuff about the world through pure reason without doing too much work, but it turns out to be not very interesting. And that's an analytic truth. So in other words, if I say A equals A, I'm saying something that's true and I'm doing it through pure reason, because there are no A's in the world that I'm going to verify.

I just simply am stating it definition. So that's true. It's just not particularly exciting. And one of the things that's really critical here is that Kant thinks that once you gain something from experience, like you learn a concept through experience, you can then have analytic a priori truths about that experience concept without referring back to it.

19:12 Wes: Right?

19:13 Seth: So in other words, once you learn that the definition of A bachelor is somebody who is not married. You can then say analytic a priori. Bachelors are unmarried men by definition, bachelors are unmarried men. And that is a phrase that even though you have the concept through experience, the proposition that bachelors are unmarried men is analytic a priori. You are making that through pure reason. But that's just not very interesting. So the question is, is there any way that you can take any concept that you have, whether you got it through experience or whether you got it through pure reason, and add something new to it, learn something new without recourse to experience, just through pure reason alone?

Like, could you come up with something and saying, like, there are no bachelors, or there are 27 bachelors, or there are more than 500 bachelors, just through pure reason alone, without recourse to actually going and verifying an experience.

20:07 Mark: And again, I think we have to look at why he's doing this, because he's reflecting on these philosophers that we've read some of, like Leibniz and Plato, and seeing the kind of things that they were coming up with. Or again, I'll mention Descartes arguments like his argument for the existence of God, which is an old one, this ontological argument which just looks at the concept of God and analyze this concept and says, oh, it's such a great concept of infinity. And because everything must be brought about by something that has at least as much reality as it. And this concept is so awesome that it must have been actually brought about by the actual God that's not looking out at the world and saying, I see that God causes. Or you can't even get the principle that, you know, everything only comes from something that's greater than it, from experience. It's a pure a priori argument.

20:58 Wes: And Leibniz, for instance, we saw with our podcast in the Monadology, he thinks that everything is analytic, including Marx having two kids. So that was his solution to the problem.

21:09 Mark: Explain that a little more if you're going to bring it up.

21:11 Wes: Everything has a concept. Every monad has a concept. And every predicate, including relational predicates, like so and so is the father of so and so. Those sorts of predicates are within the concept of that thing. Because he was disturbed by the ontology of relations in the same way that Hume was worried about causality. Because it's not like when you say father of, there's an object out there that corresponds to father of. That's the problem that leads to all of this, that these synthetic relational.

21:43 Mark: But there is an object out there, it's sperm.

21:45 Wes: Yeah, but the problem that these synthetic relational assertions are hard to, let's say, model metaphysically or something like that. So he wanted, you know, solutions just to do away with that and say, in fact, there's a concept that everything is included in analytically now, I mean,

22:02 Mark: what do you guys think about this? So this is his target is this kind of philosophy and saying, and he, and he says this is the only kind of metaphysics that's possible. If you think you could do any metaphysics based on just looking at experience itself, that's just obviously ludicrous. Whereas we just had an episode not that long ago on physics, right, which seemed to be about metaphysics. And it's people like measuring and studying things and coming up with conjectures about the way reality actually is. That seems like it's metaphysics, it's empirical.

22:29 Seth: Well, I think that we have to refer back to the Hume discussion because it seems like he took Hume's argument against the possibility of metaphysics very seriously. That to go back to Azzurra's point about the four square, which we'll post a little graphic of on the website, Kant is saying that he wants to make metaphysics a science. And that means being able to get access to information, synthetic, useful, whatever, information about the world through pure reason. And he says, but we have a devastating critique of this possibility as represented by Hume's demonstration that there is no way to get cause and effect as a concept synthetically through experience.

And basically what he says is it's a devastating critique if you're trying to do metaphysics empirically, if you're trying to discover things that way. But it is not that, you know, he's going to respond to that and show that it's possible to get synthetic concepts through pure reason. And so, Mark, you had mentioned the enterprise of doing metaphysics as this exercise in doing synthetic a priori reasoning and not getting through experience. And I think what Kant thinks is that Hume proved sort of unequivocally that doing metaphysics through empirical data, whether synthetic or otherwise, is not possible.

And that was the significance of what he saw in Hume's work and that he felt like many of the other, you know, he mentions that other people did not understand the significance of what Hume proved.

23:57 Mark: Well, he definitely doesn't want your metaphysics to be made up of probabilities. He thinks that's poor and pathetic. He's not going to be satisfied with that. And that's all you can get out of experience. I mean, if you're basing things on induction. I mean, I guess I had a subsequent thought too. Just going back to our discussion of Hume for a second. Hume was saying you can't get the concept of causality through reason itself and you can't get it straight from experience. So it's something that builds up over time. And in fact it's just instinct that when we see things repeatedly, in fact it's dumb instinct because animals have it, babies have it. And so we are saying from that that really Hume doesn't have any way of allowing causality. Wes was saying to play the role that it needs to in science.

24:40 Seth: Right, right, yeah.

24:42 Azura: So you could almost say that causality for Hume is a kind of conditioning.

24:46 Mark: Yep, exactly right. But my thought subsequent to that was can't reason make some use of it as a theoretical construct after the fact. So maybe we have this idea in the first place through some dumb instinct. And in fact I might deny that we really have the notion or that babies or animals have the notion that everything has a cause. Right? This universal. All we know is that something happens and then something else happens and we get an expectation. That doesn't even mean everything has a cause. That just means sometimes things cause other things. And like if something bad happens to you, you think about what you were doing when that bad things happens and you try not to do that again. Or if something good happens, do you

25:25 Wes: think there's something in the world without a cause? Mark?

25:27 Mark: I'm thinking that what instinct tells us. I don't think instinct makes this fancy universal claim like that we get this idea of causality from this dumb instinct. But then as scientists we say, let's just assume for the sake of making useful theories that this causality is everywhere. And then in fact, when we run into something like we were talking about in quantum physics where maybe, wow, it looks like, you know, there's this thing violates the laws of causality, then we're really surprised and it challenges us. Which to me just shows that this notion of universal causality is a very well grounded hypothesis.

Whereas Kant says if it's going to be useful for science at all, it has to be certain. It has to be something that's a priori certain, necessary. If it has to be that, then the only way it could be there is because you've sort of imposed that necessity is his claim. Does it have to be certain?

26:17 Seth: Okay, I think I see what you're saying.

26:19 Azura: I think that it's important to remember here that Kant is trying to make metaphysics seem on par with physics as it was understood at his time. Right. So he's thinking of Newtonian physics as being the only possible physical model, whereas now we know that Newtonian physics, you know, works in certain circumstances, but doesn't work overall. So I think for us as contemporary thinkers, the idea that maybe science is an approximation of the truth in the sense that we might say that it kind of like a logarithm, attempts to reach the truth, but maybe never gets there because there is no truth, or maybe just never gets there. I think that as contemporary thinkers, we're going to be far more open to that possibility than Kant would have been.

27:05 Mark: Yes. Asymptotal is the word you're looking for.

27:07 Azura: Thank you. It's been a while since I've been in a math class.

27:09 Wes: I think this is about more than certainty. And this is still a popular debate in philosophy of science. And your average scientist would think it's absurd to say that there's no such thing really as causality. Oh, the phenomenon X didn't really cause phenomenon. Yes. It's all in the head. But we're just going to assume that because it's useful, they would find that horrific. So Kant wants to, you know. Yeah. If you don't have his aim, if you're not worried about the objectivity. And part of, by the way, the worry about objectivity is just making a distinction between thoughts that are completely subjective, like, oh, this tastes sweet, you know, when someone else is going to find it tasting sour and those that are objective.

So if you don't have that worry and you're not concerned about whether there's some real component of the world which undergirds causality. Yeah. Then you're not going to go this direction. That's a premise. And this whole enterprise is built on that premise. The premise that there must be some real component in the world which explains or gives a foundation to causality. And then the premise that math and science are specimens of a priori synthetic knowledge.

28:12 Mark: Should we walk through the steps of his theory of mind, just talk about sensibility, then understanding and reason, just to get that on the table to enrich this.

28:20 Wes: Sure.

28:21 Mark: So, sensibility, Wes, why don't you tell us about. Kant said that sensibility gives us a priori necessary knowledge of time and space the way they are.

28:32 Wes: Yeah.

28:33 Mark: They're the form of our experience.

28:34 Wes: Yeah. So sensibility is an answer to this question. How is pure mathematics possible? What that means is how is mathematics possible as a genuine science or a genuine branch of knowledge where its genuineness must have that element of necessity that we just talked about with causality. In the same way that causality can't come in intuitively, can't be sucked in through the senses, so space and time itself can. Rather than being an object out there that we can observe, space and time are in a way forms of everything that we empirically observe.

One of the important assertions here is that we don't have access to things in themselves. And again, he's thinking on that Lockean model where you explain the way color in terms of an interaction of, say, the eye and waves bouncing off an external object. Well, here it's the interaction of the mind and the way the world affects the mind and creates all of these representations. But what we have are representations. We don't have this unmediated access to things in themselves. And so you get what he calls sensibility of time and space, which again are these formal elements that apply to everything that we can empirically experience, as opposed to properties of things in themselves or as them themselves, observable things that we can get from the outside.

29:56 Mark: This is his equivalent to what Hume called impressions, right? This sensibility, just the raw sense data that is coming at you, which are just unconnected images or whatever. And as long as you're dealing with sensibility. So this part of the mind that really has to do with how the senses are constructed. And he thinks the only things the senses impose on this information is this form of time and space. And he's even more specific than that because space only applies to things in outer sense, whereas time applies to your reflections in your own thoughts as well.

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