Kant Against Kant VI
From Appendix B of The Refutation of Kant
By the logic of Kant’s own Amphiboly chapter, this pattern is diagnostic. Kant charged Leibniz with maintaining a principle valid in one domain and extending it to cover another without adjusting the conditions of application. The post-Kantian defenders do the same thing in reverse: they maintain a principle of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself that was defensible as Reading A, extend it to cover Reading B, and when the extension is challenged, they expand the scope of Reading A’s domain rather than concede that Reading B was never warranted. The defense recapitulates the error the diagnostic was built to catch. The more the phenomenal expands, the more obviously Reading B is doing nothing. The more obviously Reading B is doing nothing, the more clearly the slide from A to B is visible as the unargued inference it always was.
The method this book applies to Kant is not foreign to Kant. It is Kant’s own method, consistently applied. The Amphiboly chapter develops one version of the diagnostic. The six papers reproduced and summarized in Appendix A apply an independently developed version of the same diagnostic across six domains. In each case, the pattern of error is the same: a key term operating in two distinguishable senses, with an unargued inference between them, generating conclusions that are treated as established when they are in fact artifacts of the amphiboly.
The form of respect this offers Kant is the form the book has previously articulated: taking him seriously enough to apply his insights even where he failed them apply it himself. Kant developed the amphiboly diagnostic. This book applies it to him. And where the diagnostic lands on Kant himself, the result is not a refutation imposed from outside but one completed from within.
VERIPHYSICS: The Refutation of Kant: The Fault in the Foundation and the Key to the Closed Door by Vox Day is now available for Amazon Kindle, KU, and audiobook.
This refutation of Kant is about as rock-solid as one can get. Excellent work.
As in Aesop's fable The Eagle and the Arrow, "We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction." Or as Aeschylus suggests in The Myrmidons: "With our own feathers, not by others' hands, Are we now smitten."
Neurolinguistics provides a concise method for cutting through this style of bafflegab. The NLP pattern is known as the 'cause-effect complex equivalence,' and is so manifestly formulaic in its presentation, that there are 14 different ways to reframe it without any domain understanding required. #SleightOfMouth