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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Tuesday, September 13, 2016

GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT

Here it is, by popular demand, Lecture 2 in my immortal series on the Critique of Pure Reason [everything on the web is immortal, like nuclear waste.]  This one starts with a nifty story about me and Bertrand Russell ]and goes downhill from there.]  On to the Transcendental Aesthetic!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

You repeat in this lecture the claim that analytic judgements can be known a posteriori - a claim you made on this blog, but which I thought had been refuted in the comments.

Consider the analytic judgement, "All bachelors are unmarried". Since this claim applies to ALL bachelors, past, present, and future, no finite amount of experience - such as would be available to your dimwitted sociologists - could suffice to afford KNOWLEDGE of it.

Kant himself even points out that it would be absurd to consult experience in determining the truth of analytic claims.

s. wallerstein said...

What if you had told Russell that you were interested not only in Kant, but also in Marx!

Robert Paul Wolff said...

I think he might have thrown me out, peer of the realm or not! But at the age of 20 I was not.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Anonymous, I thought in my lecture I indicated that one could not know the judgment with necessity or universality. It was by way of being a jest, but I guess it fell flat.

David Gordon said...

Tour lectures are Kant are great! If you had told Russell that you were interested in Marx, he could have replied that he wrote about Marx in 1896, in his German Social Democracy.

Anonymous said...

Please keep the videos coming! Where may I get a copy of the version of the critique you are using, and which version are you reading from so I may follow along?

s. wallerstein said...

David Gordon,

What does Russell say about Marxism in German Social Democracy?

My comment above is based on his History of Western Philosophy, written fifty years later, where he treats Marx negatively and gives the impression of not having read Marx very extensively.

David Gordon said...

Mr.Wallerstein,

Russell is critical of Marx, but he seems to have read the first volume of Capital. See the first lecture here: https://archive.org/details/germansocialdem00russgoog

s. wallerstein said...

David Gordon,

Thank you for the link.

Anonymous said...

Professor Wolff,

Thank you for your lectures. Your remarks about how people respond to Kant's examples reminds me of a passage from the preface to the A edition:

"...We can say with equal justice that many a book would have been much clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear. For the aids to clearness, though they may be of assistance in regard to details, often interfere with our grasp of the whole. The reader is not allowed to arrive sufficiently quickly at a conspectus of the whole; the bright colouring of the illustrative material intervenes to cover over and conceal the articulation and organisation of the system, which, if we are to be able to judge of its unity and solidity, are what chiefly concern us." (Axix)

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Anonymous, a lovely citation. Odd as it may seem to say it, kant was a graceful writer, for all of his difficulty.