Post reflection on theme 1:

The first theme is done and it was pretty tough but I have learned many new things. I have prepared myself for this week by doing pre-reflection on Theme 1. In which I have read Kant’s and Plato’s text over and over again to understand their views which requires a lot of patience, then I answered some questions about ‘how we understand the world?’ and ‘what is knowledge by itself?’ After posting the blog I thought that I understood the author’s text but then I had a lecture on Monday, after attending the lecture I became confuse about their philosophies and concepts.

The lecture was started with the basic concepts about naturalism and scientism then difference between them. We also discussed primary qualities and secondary qualities of the world but when lecture moved forward to ‘Kant’s critique of pure reason’ so it became confuse and took me a lot of effort to understand especially when it came to this philosophy, ‘’Perception without conception is blind & conception without perception is empty.’’

However, the seminar was really good and it made me to have clearer understandings of these two texts. We started by discussing the analytic and synthetic judgments and then we discussed one interesting question, ‘’ How is it possible to gain knowledge of the world a priori? ‘’ For example, how our ancestors made concepts about the world and gave names to things, is it a knowledge? Also the other question, ‘’what is the meaning of knowledge?’’ It is difficult to describe the meaning of knowledge, we tried to answer with many interesting examples but still examples are not enough to define knowledge. Then seminar came up with another interesting topic ‘the concept of empiricism’ and here we discussed very comprehensive example that ‘how new born babies see things with the blank mind?’ From the philosopher’s point of view, it is very hard to explain these questions and it requires very deep understanding and insight to answer these questions. Well, we did a lot of discussion about these questions but could not find actual answer.

At last, the world is meaningful and forms of intuitions like time and space conforms the knowledge of the world. The world would not have any meaning without human beings and authors wants us to see things in terms of meanings rather than facts.