Q&A: Academia and Kant
Academia and Kant
Question
Hello Rabbi, I would appreciate your thoughts on two questions on different topics:
1. What is the Rabbi’s opinion regarding academic studies such as women and human rights? Is there some science or body of knowledge there that is worth engaging in, or are these fields of interest that arose because of postmodern discourse and do not contain any real substantive teaching?
2. Regarding the Rabbi’s criticism in the book Two Circles of Kant’s analytic conception, what exactly prevents us from accepting that transcendental idealism is what allows us to know the world without believing in some coordinating factor between reason and the world as it is in itself? And how does the train to Scotland prove belief in the existence of such a coordinating factor? Why, without belief in a coordinating factor, would we not get off the train? After all, one could still say that because this is the form in which we know the world, we will get off the train every time we see a sign.
Thank you very much.
Answer
1. I don’t know what you mean. There is no academic field of women and human rights. There is what is called gender studies, which in my opinion, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is politically correct nonsense. And human rights are studied in philosophy, law, international relations, and the like. There is nothing complicated here, and you can also study it on your own.
2. Kant’s view is not analytic in the full sense. The analytic-synthetic terminology is borrowed from our own framework. It’s hard for me to elaborate here, but I think I explained it there. Also see the fourth notebook, in the first part, which is entirely devoted to the logic of this argument.