Victor Gijsbers is assistant professor of philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands, focusing on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and sometimes veering off into the history of modern European philosophy. On his channel, he posts lecture series about philosophical articles and books -- including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason -- as well as loose topics and more systematic courses.
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This is top tier!
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yeah, i agree that Kant dont hide reality from us. kant is realist for sure, i guess, but not naive and even a little bit more critical then hume and locke. husserl probably hide the reality behind transcendental scheme but even his (especially in late works) idealistic sceptical view on hidden distorted reality is just a method to get deeper into perceptions and sensations and all the stuff that's happening in our minds. idk Kant has found probably the best rational ground both for reality, subjectivity and this necessity of distortion.. like probably the best one imho.. dude had big bday also this year. hooray! i love him and he is not looney at all for me.. husserl probably is at some point
thank you very much. i ve read critique, schelling's system and husserls works... and i ve found so many good answers on questions of consiousness and subjective experience, but now i cant understand how to talk about time and reality..kinda outside of my poor finite mind 😂😭. i also find this system is quite good for ethic.
Why isn't space an object?
These are much better than robert paul wolff
Thanks! I enjoyed the Wolff ones, and learned from them, but he has a bit of a tendency to go off on side roads. :D
So platonic sceptics were close to taoists
Yes, incommensurability claims are mostly dubious. In practice, a new outlook or shift in the paradigm is met with resistance. As the shift takes place there will be scientists who had worked with the paradigm who are particularly sceptical, but not outside the dialogue. I saw this as a student after Peter Mitchell had developed his chemiosmotic theory (also known as 'hypothesis' by the more sceptical) for how ATP is produced in mitochondria. Mitchell's revolutionary insights depended on an appreciation of chemistry within the context of biological structures, that had only recently been revealed by the development of electron microscopy. In the early 70s when I was a student there were still lecturers who were sceptical and proposed an alternative speculation that there might be a chemical intermediate involved that was yet to be found, but this did not mean that they were unable to engage and present Peter Mitchell's work. Nonetheless they were people whose outlook depended more on the chemistry involved without considering so much the biological structures involved. It is more that the paradigm creates a barrier for what turns out to be a very fruitful area of research. Peter Mitchell did encounter opposition to his work, but enterprisingly set up, with another scientist (Jennifer Moyle) a charitable research company (Glynn Research Ltd) in a remote region of Cornwall, where the theory was developed. Ultimately the scepticism improved the research, it uncovered errors which they were able to address and refine the theory. Oddly it is still current in higher school science to quote values for how much ATP can be generated from a glucose molecule that are really based on the old paradigm. The expected exam answer of 38 ATPs per glucose is actually a fiction since the point of the Mitchell theory is that the mechanism cannot assure a definite value. In reality the yield of DNA is roughly around 30 to 32 ATPs per molecule (but this answer will lose you marks in an exam!
Thanks for sharing!
I'd like to see you on cable TV
I'd like to see your take on Feyerabend. I think he solves a lot of the criticisms leveled against Kuhn while still achieving a critique of a universal scientific method.
Love this series, awesome video
15:04
Synthetic a priori knowledge - knowledge that doesn’t require experience but that increases our knowledge 1:03
both Dawkins and Haack are right, Harding is ridiculous... The entire passage doesn't help
All events have a cause? Does that mean that someone or something causes a group of event or that event in the group has some cause or other? If it means that the group has a cause, some group members, might be uncaused.
Wonderful as always. Will you be discussing related concepts like epistemic injustice?
I have videos lined up about standing epistemology, fake news, and post-truth. Due to time reasons I didn't manage to make an epistemic injustice video for my Leiden course; I may do one for on here, but I haven't fully committed to it yet.
Around minute 28, you/Kant say we are "required to be aware of the very act of synthesis". Why do I need to be "aware" of the act of synthesis. This I do not understand. As long as I have a single unified consciousness to which objects are presented as a unity, why do I need to be aware of how they were unified?
Whoa! At 0:37 I say that Aristotelian science is still alive in the 7th century AD, but of course I meant to say that it was still alive in the 17th century AD!
You are right to contrast Aristotle with Descartes, though you could have also included Galileo, Locke, Newton and many others. It may be unfair to pin the blame on Aristotle, that I suppose belongs to his fervent medieval advocates, but it has been the rejection of Aristotelian teleological dogmas that invoke causes, forms and ends that has led to the explosion of scientific and technological knowledge over the last 400 years. This can be seen to have happened one by one in all the major fields of science starting with Physics, then Chemistry, followed by Biology and yes also today in Psychology. I do not know how it is in the Netherlands, but my daughter's course of Experimental Psychology at Oxford certainly had no time for anything like Aristotelian thinking. I dare say it is possible to find some off beat 'new age' wannabee scientists or 'pop' psychologists who do entertain all sorts of ideas, but they stand out as odd balls rather than serious contributors. What is interesting from our perspective and perhaps romanticised by our perspective are the activities of the Ionian presocratics such as Thales, Leucippus and Democritus who appeared to have an approach much more in tune with post renaissance thinking. They seemed to be more concerned with finding inviolable patterns in the natural world. For Aristotle this approach was lacking in goals and soulless and for him unacceptable. Unfortunately the ideas of Aristotle held sway for the next two millennia.
I don't think Aristotelian ideas are very prominent in experimental psychology, but I think elements of it are very prominent indeed in all forms of clinical psychology. As soon as you try to make someone healthy, you need a distinction between a healthy state and an unhealthy state, and this is a distinction that has *no* place in the metaphysics of modern natural science. It requires the idea that physical systems like the body and the brain are intrinsically normative, that is, being the system they are comes with certain ways that the system ought to be -- a deeply Aristotelian way of thinking. The only alternative would be to say that 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' are merely subjective, but then why would any scientist care about them? So I think we are more Aristotelian than we tend to think. (Although of course that doesn't mean that we accept all or even most of his ideas; I'm only talking about certain very general elements of his overall metaphysics here.) So I'm certainly not linking this to any kind of new age or fringe theorising, but to the very idea of a science that *cures*.
@@VictorGijsbers You could say the same of physical health and general practitioners, but the reality is that treatments look for physical rationales. I write this from a hospital ward myself; I have been in some considerable pain for which I get morphine at night. There is no suggestion of subjectivity or a concept of a norm involved and the action of opiate drugs are well understood. The source of my pain is not understood, so further physical investigations are planned. Possibly identification of the origins of mental maladies can be more of a challenge and perhaps there is more variation from country to country, but these days I think it more usual for physically identifiable indicators. I have had several blood tests lately, alongside my results the normal range is also indicated. Although physicians may well compare to these 'norms', I do not think there is anything Aristotelian about these statistically derived parameters. That said medicine has taken longer than the sciences to catch up and I guess that treatment of mental disorders was even slower, so Aristotelian approaches (which I indeed tend to dismiss as fringe or new age) may persist in some quarters.. Nor would I compare this to palliative care: there are conditions we know we are powerless to remedy, the treatment of symptoms does rely on a scientific understanding (e.g. action of opiates) of the care involved.
@@VictorGijsbers I agree. In natural sciences, from physical chemistry to ethology, we calculate and speak of state penalties of molecules (As if God or State was punishing them for not being energetically favorable), species have native or natural environments, proteins have native states and orientations and multiple deviations or aberrations , tissues and organs have particular and multiple functions and deviations from them, the whole of pathology is describing "abnormal" tissues incompatible with life, the cephalopods release ink with the clear goal or intention to escape the predator, the purpose of breathing reflex is to keep us alive as it is sensitive to any decrease in blood oxygen level, attachment to other humans, regular sleep and emotions all have their roles for "normal" development and so on. Even bones and muscles tend to degenerate and decompose if we are not using them for locomotion or exercise (not fulfilling their function). So yes, I would say that Aristotelianism is pretty much alive, and almost common-sense or automatic in describing emergent and/or normative properties concerning behaviour and health of humans and other animals. As someone that got interested in the metaphysics only in the recent years, I'd say that it takes learning the history of metaphysics to see how little we think today and how great thinkers and events literally own thoughts we find in our heads.
I hope this is one of many videos. Thank you! I would differentate Aristotelian science vs. modern science as seen in our development of tools. Without the microscope or telescope, modern science would not have developed as it is today. Modern philosophy / science needed to develop the tools to explore the universe in the context of matter vs. form. Again, thank you for all your content.
Certainly, the idea of tools (and experiments) is an entire other dimension of difference, though one that is perhaps less philosophically central. (I'm sure some philosophers would disagree with that claim.)
In summary, Aristotelian science kant be blamed for "the purposeless chaos of matter" in which we now find ourselves. If here we plan to dwell, and "we attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building," then perhaps it is true that "only a god can save us" now. Thus in so building we may have to "deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." 😉
What is the status of the four elements (fire, water, earth, air) given that species are fundamental?
This is a great question. So, Aristotle might say that if you were to look at the constituents of humans, you of course find bone and blood and such; but if you delve down more deeply, you find the four elements. Knowing about the four elements will even allow you to explain a limited set of facts about humans; for instance, we fall down because we contain more earth and water than air and fire. However, this type of explanation is extremely limited for Aristotle. Knowing about the four elements is NOT going to allow you to understand how human beings act and develop. You need human beings as a fundamental entity -- that is, an entity that is at the basis of explanation. Earth, air, water, and fire are also fundamental in that sense, but it is only in the 17th century that science becomes really invested in the idea that knowing about the fundamental particles will allow us to explain everything. (By the way, I think this is a mistake. Reductionism does not work across the board.)
@@VictorGijsbers So for the Aristotelian no ontological priority is given to either some part or the whole, whereas science after Descartes took up the idea that the whole is nothing more than the sum of the parts. I agree reductionism fails to account for at least some of the high-level features/phenomena. Thank you for the explanation!
I very much enjoy and appreciate your work, but I'm sorry to say that this video is subpar for you, Dr. Gijsbers. You have misrepresented Aristotle rather grossly, in that you presented his complex view only from the aspect of the formal cause. Further, you have inserted a bias against his system by stating that a norm is equivalent to "an ought to be" or a "proper" way of being, both of which are laden with judgement not inherent in the formal cause. You do slip into the final cause, but again, you insert your own ethical judgments into what is supposedly Aristotle's framework.
On my understanding of Aristotle, the four causes form an indissoluble whole. The formal cause and the teleological cause are not two different things, but more two ways of viewing a single essence. The efficient cause too is part of this; the efficient cause of a human must be another human, because the efficient cause in such a case is a propagation of form. Now, obviously, I didn't talk about any of this. I think that's defensible in a short video on the difference between Aristotle and modern science. But I'm not yet convinced I misrepresented his system. (And, just to be clear, the 'ought' here is not an ethical ought! It's precisely a difference between the Aristotelian and the 'modern' world view that there can be natural oughts with no direct ethical significance in the Aristotelian world view.)
@@VictorGijsbers Thank you for being the efficient cause of this video. Given that this is an insightful, short, and non technical video on one big question - call that the form of the video - I, for one, won't take you task in the comments for failing to cover every related subtopic nor for, say, not including quotations in the original Greek. Then again, some might argue that the final cause of KZread videos is not conveying a concept in a lively manner, nor entertainment, but, something like generating the "creativity" in the comments section. Anyway you look at it, it's a win.
@@VictorGijsbers Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and I agree with much of what you say. Having rewatched your video twice, I still believe that this video simplifies too much in your effort to make the point. For example, you omitted Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," which is the initial cause for all motion and change in the universe. This aspect of his metaphysics ultimately explains why individual entities may exhibit exceptional qualities deviating from their normative formal causes. In other words, the causes are not the final word in Aristotle's science, and the Unmoved Mover constitutes, in effect, a fundamental law of nature. Similarly, Descartes (still) relies on God's eternal perfection for proof of mental and physical substances. Further, he requires innate knowledge of God for his proofs. One could argue that in this regard, along with the importance he placed on mathematics (as opposed to Aristotle's biological focus), Descartes is actually stepping back from Aristotle toward Plato's theory of forms. It is true that Galileo removed the formal and final causes in his mechanics, thereby distancing science from previous philosophy and, particularly, metaphysics. But Descartes clearly felt the need to reexamine and restate metaphysics in the new scientific age. He certainly did not dispense with it. The primary difference between Aristotelian science and modern science, as far as I can see it, is that the latter called into question the reliability of our own sensory experience in gaining knowledge of the world. (Zeno, anyone?) Famously, this is the fundamental position of Descartes as he begins the philosophical endeavor of his Meditations. Responding to Descartes, Locke sought to reaffirm our experiential knowledge, which is clearly necessary for modern science, by relocating cause to the object of an uncertain, experiencing subject. As for the notion that modern science dispensed with "norms" or "standards" or "oughts" or "propers," it was and still is concerned with determining normative forms, no matter how much Galileo or Newton might protest. This is the very goal of the scientific process of induction, the subject of an excellent video you made a few years ago, as I recall. The difference is that they have moved the explanatory power of Aristotle's causes, rooted in the Unmoved Mover, and Descartes's God to a largely unspecified, ignored, and tacit metaphysical system that takes many, if not most, norms as givens.
It occurs to me that substance must not only have a certain form it also needs to have the right origins (history, genealogy). This would prevent androids or clones that have the form of a human being from counting as human. 3:41
I’m using this idea as my main argument against Bakers constitution view on person on my c-essay right now (Bakers kind concept)
will you further develop on aristotelian physics, and on his distinction btw practical and theoretical philosophy ?
i'm confused. In Descartes, isnt the most fundamental thing the cogito ? Which isnt matter ? Or did he also try to explain the cogito as emerging from matter ?
For Descartes, mind and matter are both fundamental. That is why he is called a substance dualist.
Mind is an independent substance for Descartes, just as fundamental as matter. However, only matter is the subject of science, which is why I restrict myself to that part of his ontology here.
@@MichaelJimenez416 ty for the answer. And how does he found his materialist ontology ? I mean, I read somewhere the part on cogito and got his point on why cogito is fundamental. But where does he talk about matter ?
The Meditations have a long section on matter, although insight into the cogito comes first. You can check out especially Meditations 5 and 6.
amazing topic, thank you !
As many have said before me: These explanations are brilliant, thank you very much! I have not been through all the comments in the series, so you might have already answered the question I'm about to ask, and if that is the case (no pun intended), I apologize. What do you think about the Tractatus English translation made by the Gutenberg Project ?
take a cue from the venerable Graham Oppy - he appears online with an empty bookshelf behind him ,... or populated only with children's board games.
i just find it problematic that knowledge gained previously through sense data experience i.e. learning the axioms of geometry, and then later manipulating mental images to reach a conclusion, should be called a priori. in the process of imagining, there is also a witnessing awarenesss to which that imagining is an experience. it's not without experience it's just an experience that doesn't have physical stuff involved. i could just as easily demonstrate with lines in the sand. it's no different than using the canvas of my mind.
Construct for this man a temple
Did pyrrho invent pyrrosol?
'shortest line BETWEEN 2 points' 'straight line BETWEEN 2 points' it's analytical. you can't just take the meaning of 'straight', 'shortest', 'line', and 'point'. you need to analyze it as a whole. in which case 'between' is what gives the whole a concrete meaning.
this whole notion of a priori knowledge just strikes me as nonsensical. even in the case of arithmetic/mathmatics i would have to have previous experience learning the meaning of the numerals and operators and the rules of operation.
But that's why I point out in the video that 'a priori' does not mean that one can know something before having had any experience, but that it means that one doesn't need to appeal to experience to justify one's belief.
@VictorGijsbers but there is an appeal to memory recall, which is experience. even if it happens so quickly that one is not aware that that is what has actually happened.
The replication crisis in science is taken seriously because, as you said, science cannot function if published results cannot be trusted.
Berkeley could have been an easy victim for theft. If he wasn't looking, he couldn't be certain of what happen with his things.
I'm a simple man with simple needs. I see Victor Gijsbers' notification, I click.
Life is simple once you've figured out where to find the good stuff! ;-)
Hi Victor. I hope you receive this well. I have a Popper question and no one seems to have a an answer for me. I want to know if Ai and big Data fly in the face of Popper problem with Historicism? I cringe every time I hear people talk about making PREDICTIONS with big data. Is this something other Popper enthusiasts have thought about?
You might like the article "Does the sun rise for ChatGPT? Scientific discovery in the age of generative AI" by David Leslie. It's not about Popper, but it does argue that by itself generative AI is merely repeating patterns we already possess, rather than coming up with the new, and that this flies in the face of a critical attitude.
@@VictorGijsbers Thank you very much. I’ll look it up. Interesting time to be a thinker.
Sir, would you please suggest some essential readings in this topic? I am interested to know further about the debate.
One article I recommend in Rorty's "Solidarity or Objectivity", which defends the anti-realist side. Thomas Nagel's "The Last Word" can be read as defending realism. I believe Michael Dummett has also written about this topic. This blog post of mine might also be of interest to you: lilith.cc/~victor/dagboek/index.php/2022/10/11/anti-realism-and-the-decline-of-truth/
@@VictorGijsbers Thank you very much, Sir. Great help.
Wonderful!! I subscribed after hearing the first sentence! Like Russell essentially did after reading W’s first sentence!
"Nothing is both blue and red at the same time." Yet, if I am moving quickly away from something that appears blue, it will appear red (Einstein). This has been experimentally verified, so the statement is contradicted by experiment (i.e. by empiricism itself). Equally, we could be brains in vats, being fed signals along our nerves that presents to us as the colour blue, even though there is no colour founding it. Same with almost all propositions, except "I think therefore I am," and one other statement.
You're still not experiencing something as both entirely blue and entirely red at the same time, which is how I think the statement is meant. (Otherwise, we could cast doubt on it by just thinking about the experiences of different people.)
Unfortunately for Quine ... Imagine a brain in a vat that has been connected to an AI computer that feeds it with information in exactly the same way that we normally develop our world-view. Only this computer creates images that we might normally interpret as a individuals of our own kind that appear as dogs and who create language as a series of perhaps complicated body signals and yaps. Then empiricism fails utterly - the only world is an imaginary one, and we could be misled entirely. For example, our interpretation of blue and red is utterly fallacious. Why do philosophers choose such easy to disassemble arguments? Why does anyone treat Quine as if he had any reasonable idea of philosophy.
Is your point that Quine isn't giving an argument against radical scepticism? But why think he's in the business of doing so?
We are grateful. Please upload more videos Education is for everyone..
We are grateful. Please upload more videos Education is for everyone..
I recommended this to my friends. The best Tractatus run I've seen on KZread and in class. Hope to see the next chapter soon.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Why not replace "the correspondence theory" with "the conformity theory?" Sometimes I wonder whether each truth theory is circular because you can ask whether it's true. Do we need to know what truth consists of to know what theory of truth is correct?
Quine believes we may need to revise the laws of logic. So, what would happen to his empiricism if we changed the law of noncontradiction? Inductive arguments presuppose it because you need it to falsify an inductive argument's conclusion. But my senses must be reliable for me to find a counterexample to an empirically tested theory. Qunine could say I could deny the law of noncontradiction and revise my belief web to keep that denial true. In that case, how could I know know what beliefs to change to preserve logical consistency?
I loved the bees analogy and the different points of view presented. However, I'm still a bit confused. I've read a couple of encyclopedic entries and several articles, but I find myself becoming more and more confused. This helped a little. I am inclined towards semantic externalism, and I wasn't sure if epistemic externalism necessarily accompanies it, but now I don't think so. You also mentioned AI and that it cannot have knowledge. I agree. However, I think it is theoretically possible for an AI system to have knowledge in an externalist sense. From the point of view of semantic externalism, AI cannot be attributed meanings in Putnam's externalist sense, but there is theoretically no problem for it to have knowledge from an epistemically externalist perspective. If the necessary condition for knowledge from an externalist point of view (e.g., reliabilist) is to obtain it from a reliable source, then hypothetically, if we trained a large language model and provided the AI system in which the LLM is embedded with methods to verify (or at least check) its outputs, we could acknowledge that the AI system has methods (since it has the methods to verify information).
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