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    Kant's Refutation of Idealism fails to provide leverage a... — Carmelics
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    Kant's Refutation of Idealism fails to provide leverage against external-world skepticism because a skeptic who doubts external objects would equally doubt memory of temporally ordered past experiences.

    Skepticism
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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Descartes' demon hypothesis in the Meditations shows that memory of temporal sequence is as vulnerable to systematic deception as perception of external objects.
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    • 2.Kant's argument in B275-B279 presupposes the reliability of inner temporal experience, yet Hume's bundle theory dissolves the persistent self needed to anchor that temporal sequence.
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    • 3.If the self is just a bundle of impressions with no guaranteed continuity, then 'I remember A before B' requires exactly the kind of diachronic identity that skepticism about substance already undermines.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Barry Stroud in 'The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism' argues that transcendental arguments fail when the skeptic can consistently deny the very epistemic capacities the argument presupposes.
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    • 2.Kant's Refutation requires that inner sense reliably delivers genuinely ordered temporal content, but a skeptic in the Cartesian tradition is entitled to doubt whether inner sense is itself veridical.
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    • 3.Since Kant himself acknowledges in the Paralogisms that inner sense does not give knowledge of the soul as a thing-in-itself, the reliability of memory-based temporal ordering cannot be secured from within Kant's own system.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.A skeptic disposed to deny justification for belief in external objects would also deny justification for beliefs about past experiences and their temporal order.
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    • 2.Kant's Refutation relies on Premise (1), which assumes I have justified beliefs about temporally ordered past experiences (e.g., A, then B, then C).
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    • 3.If Premise (1) is undermined by memory skepticism, the Refutation loses its force against external-world skepticism.
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    Topics

    Skepticism

    Key Terms

    External-world skepticism(as the skeptical position Kant tried to defeat)
    The philosophical doubt that anything outside our own minds actually exists—the worry that the physical world might just be an illusion or dream.
    Kant(as used in epistemology and metaphysics)
    Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was an influential German philosopher who argued that our minds shape how we experience reality, and that we can only truly know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves.
    Leverage(as describing the effectiveness of Kant's argument)
    In philosophy, this means the logical power or strength to effectively argue against or solve a problem.
    Memory of temporally ordered past experiences(as what the skeptic might doubt along with external objects)
    Your ability to remember events from your past and know which ones happened first, second, and so on in sequence.
    Refutation of Idealism(Added to the second edition (B); further developed in a series of Reflections.)
    A transcendental argument added by Kant to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (B274–279), intended to demonstrate that external spatial objects must exist by deriving that claim from the fact that we have determinate awareness of the temporal order of our representations.

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    Related

    A skeptic disposed to deny justification for belief in external objects would al...Barry Stroud in 'The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism' argues that trans...Descartes' demon hypothesis in the Meditations shows that memory of temporal seq...

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: kant-transcendental
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    Three of the most pressing problems that have been raised for the Refutation are the following. First, a skeptic might well reject Premise (1) on the ground of a general skepticism about memory (Allison 1983: 306–7). Bertrand Russell, for example, suggests that for all I know I was born five minutes ago (Russell 1912). On this skeptical hypothesis, I would be mistaken in my belief that I had experiences A, B, and C which occurred more than five minutes ago, first A, then B, and lastly C. Plausib
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    If Premise (1) is undermined by memory skepticism, the Refutation loses its forc...
    +5 moreShow less
    If the self is just a bundle of impressions with no guaranteed continuity, then ...Kant's Refutation relies on Premise (1), which assumes I have justified beliefs ...Kant's Refutation requires that inner sense reliably delivers genuinely ordered ...Kant's argument in B275-B279 presupposes the reliability of inner temporal exper...Since Kant himself acknowledges in the Paralogisms that inner sense does not giv...

    Similar

    If Premise (1) is undermined by memory skepticism, the Refutation lose...90%Strawson conceives the Deduction as showing that the skeptic about the...87%Refuting external-world skepticism is not one of Kant's aims for the B...84%A skeptic disposed to deny justification for belief in external object...83%
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