This is simply amazing. Mr. Wolff is such a wonderful teacher and such a joy to listen to. Can’t thank him enough for conducting these lectures and can’t thank Alex enough for uploading them!
These conferences are truly fascinating even if the topics dealt with are not at all simple nor do they have the concreteness of everyday problems; the way in which the Professor manages to involve us and drag us into philosophical reasoning is very beautiful. Thank you for the opportunity to attend these classes, it is a privilege, it is a great personal enrichment!
Even though I might repeat what others have said in these comments I would like to say, JUST BRILLIANT. These are lectures that take time to find on YouTube. I even started to read what he proposes as reading for the next lecture 😅. Much better than my university lectures on Kant. I am a professor myself and I think that this is a good method of teaching. Anyway, beautiful.
Is very interesting for me, because I found myself not understanding something (very often) on Kants writing but there is a force of interest that keep me going, and now listen to Professor Wolff, give more confidence, well Kant always in his writing give the hope because he explain so accurate and he will repeated or give another example even an inch of understanding of the subject is enough to keep me going. And the other reason, to follow that kind of reasoning (I mean we are inside of his mind following his logic) in his theories is the best exiting experience, is the high in my life. (I wish I could read German so I will be reading more into his process of reasoning)
Also I would like to state that it's extremely enjoyable listening to someone who grasps the profound notions that Kant realized. I'm sure it wasn't easy for him to cram 9 years worth of meditation and compartmentalizing the grandest concepts known to man into a couple of books, and anyone that can understand his incoherent rambling for pages and pages has my utmost respect.
I think the reason Kant draws a sharp distinction between sensibility and understanding is two-fold:
1. Without this distinction, true certainty is always in question. This is what Kant identifies as the issue between the Empiricists and the Rationalists—that the Empiricists beginning with intuition could never reach any universal claim about reality. Intuition can only ever tell us something might happen and never that it must—the problem of induction. The rationalist, on the other hand, lacked a true reference for their conceptual mode of grasping the world. Concept only ever related to other concepts and therefore there was always a risk of circular truths.
Second, Kant must posit a distinction between understanding and sensibility to remain consistent with his theory of space and time as forms of intuition. Kant identifies these forms of intuition as substrates of subjectivity in which space makes possible our relationship to external objects, and time makes possible our self-relation, and therefore the very unity of the thinking subject. Kant therefore must draw a distinction within the subject between modes of knowledge which are fundamentally self-referential (concepts and categories) and modes of knowledge which depend on external affects (empirical judgements). The only way of making sense of a subject whose basic relationship to the world is spatio-temporal is to divide the subject into the inner/outer sense. One corresponds to understanding, and the other correspond to intuition