Carolina QuotesKant did not tell us his strategic secrets, and perhaps he was not fully aware of his stratagem. But in our own century, this stratagem has been formulated in what is sometimes called "Ramsey's Maxim". In cases where two opposed arguments seem internally sound but where their conclusions are incompatible and hence a stalemate is created, Frank P. Ramsey wrote, "It is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants."...We have now seen how Kant applied this maxim in the disputes concerning mathematics....We can illustrate this pattern again by referring to Kant's later attempt to resolve the space antinomy.
Lewis White Beck Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Lewis White Beck Essays on Kant and Hume (1978), Part I - "Kant's Strategy", p. 11
- year
- 1978
- locator
- p. 11
Cite this record
“Kant did not tell us his strategic secrets, and perhaps he w…” Lewis White Beck. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-5216CADA0E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/5216cada0e
More from Lewis White Beck
It is an amusing jew d’esprit to take a philosopher’s ten or twenty volumes and try to compress them to postcard length. My proposal for doing this to Kant’s will be disappointing, since hardly anyone nowadays will deny the sentence but many will deny that it is the seminal thought in Kant. But it was a highly disputable proposition in his day, and I think that some of the lasting importance of Kant is shown by the fact that it is no longer disputed. The sentence would be: In order to know and to act, it is necessary both to see and to think.
But somewhat like people who object to spending money needed in the ghettoes on exploring the moon, I think the best hope for our survival is to be based on understanding human predicaments here on earth, not expecting a saving message from super-human beings in the sky...Thinking about and even hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations, however, sharpen our search for and appreciation of the peculiar virtues and vices of the only form of life we know.
The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth.