How Do We Know What We Know?

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank Jason Hoult, Terri Kulak, Bernard Lightman, and John Mahaffy for reading my review-essay and for providing me with critical comments on it.

Notes

1. In Kant’s own words: “Now it is indeed very illuminating that I cannot know as an object itself that which I must presuppose in order to know an object at all.” I have replaced “cognize” in the translation with “know.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 442.

2. “Hominin,” noun and adjective, is the term Lieberman uses to characterize the various hominid species.

3. Lieberman later reiterates that “apes can be taught to use manual sign language or use keyboards to communicate using words, but they cannot talk” (140).

4. In addition to the “abrupt shifts in moral conduct” of the Vikings and the Germans that cannot be explained by their genes, Lieberman also points out that the “near-instant shift in Japanese conduct at the end of World War II clearly had no genetic basis” (197).

5. Lieberman does not give the source of the quotation from Hillel (whose name also is not to be found in “References”). Additionally, he does not provide the chapter and verse in Matthew from which he takes his citation or indicate the version of the Bible (New Testament) that he cites.

6. See my book, Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

7. See Wallace’s book, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications (1889).

8. See my study, Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity – Vol. I: Hermeneutics and Ontology; Vol. II: Politics and Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, paperback, 2009).

9. Kant points out in the Critique of Practical Reason that the concept of creation applies solely to subjects, i.e., to free beings, divine and human, not to objects (as known according to the scientific laws of nature). God, too, then, is a creative (practical, covenantal) agent, not a natural force. Thus Kant writes that we can “affirm [divine and human] freedom without compromising the natural mechanism of actions as appearances [i.e., as objects]… since creation has to do with their [i.e., human beings’] intelligible but not their sensible existence [i.e., with their minds but not their bodies].” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 222.