Kant leads to good doodling: I vastly improved upon my signature A/Star design (original version as seen on the back of my neck) during class!
The class started out with someone asking "What is the meaning of life?" in response to the Prof asking if there were any questions. The answer he provided involved, in part, something along the lines of "Human beings have the propensity to think they are higher than mushrooms." I clearly needed to make sure that thought got recorded for posterity.
Kant spends a lot of time talking about morals (or so I gather from the lecture and discussion in class, since I still haven't found the time or motivation to actually get through more than the first twenty pages of the Kant section in the Philosophy reader). He wants morals to be necessary and rational. He thinks people shouldn't do things that aren't in keeping with the laws of nature.
He also had a bunch of types of propositions: analytic, synthetic, and empirical. Analytic propositions are those in which the predicate is part of the subject, making the proposition necessarily true (i.e. "The tall man is a man."). Synthetic propositions are things that must be verified, usually through observation (i.e. "Elephants have gray skin."). Somehow, I am missing the definition for empirical propositions in my notes, so you're on your own there.
Kant also gets back to that whole continuum of time (by the way, space and time are both intuitions that don't exist outside of the human brain!) thing that we saw with Spinoza and some of the other earlier dudes. Basically, just because something has happened in the past doesn't mean that it will happen in the future; the state of the world today is determined by the state of the world yesterday - it's like we're part of a movie with no real say about what is happening around us. On the other hand, if there is any possibility that something could exist, then people should believe it does exist, because that belief provides meaning.
Unlike many of the philosophers before him, Kant does believe that people are free and responsible for their own actions. This is where the morality bit comes into play, in the form of categorical imperatives, which are logical laws that reason tells you should be followed. These are things like don't lie, keep promises that you make, don't steal, don't kill, etc. Kant believes that these moral imperatives should be motivated by a sense of duty, not by emotion. This led to many lovely hypothetical decision making scenarios placed in the context of the Holocaust. Bit of a downer, that.
Onwards to Hegel for the next class. He sounds like a doozy, based on Bertrand Russell's assessment.
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