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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that 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.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 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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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 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 against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 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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