Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (Before Seminar)

 1. In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition."

 The way i understand what Kant means is that objects should adapt to the knowledge of the subject instead of subject adapting to the object and knowing the object the way it is. In other words we should not perceive the object by studying or analyzing it in order to create our knowledge of the object itself, instead we should let the object adapt to our knowledge in which case the concept of the object itself would be unknown, but this way we learn more from iy. Kant wanted to apply this ideal to metaphysics in the way that Copernicus did it to explain celestial motions.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this?

What i understand about Socrates’s argues is that we can perceive the same object in a different way from each other despite we are seeing and hearing the same thing. And the reason is that the eyes and ears are instruments that allow us to see and hear things but what we actually perceive is determined by our mind.