Spectrum:
Kant in the early phases of his argument, temporarily provide for things-that-appear, i.e. 'the way things are'.
That which appears is an appearance. Things that appear are not necessarily the way things are a) in the sense of the way things are for us and b) are certainly not the way they are independent of us. Things that appear are always what appears for us, but what appears to me or some other individual may be an optical illusion or an hallucination.
Note my view of the above is in the context of the whole CPR.
It is difficult not to note it since you have repeated it so many times. Do you think I have not taken notice of it when I have responded to it?
Kant subsequent argued in detail the "that" within 'that-which-is-thought' is an illusion.
So you have said, but you have not provided any textual evidence in support of it. An “unknown something” is not a “that”. It neither points to this or that and predicates nothing of it.
It is a common claim among academicians, a serious full time researcher need 3 years full time or 5 years part time to understand [not necessary agree) Kant fully. To get a good grasp of Kant I had to do those necessary times.
Any academic who claims that Kant can be FULLY understood in 3 years or even 30 years or at all should have his or her academic qualifications questioned.
(nb: the above took me >10 minutes to find it - thus my complain of searching for quotes being time consuming)
Yes, it is. It is what I have been doing, but if you don’t feel up to the task that is not a sufficient reason to allow unsubstantiated claims to stand on their own.
Note one need to master the idea of the Whole of the CPR.
My point is you are taking passages torn from the whole contexts of the CPR, thus it is difficult to align with the real theme of the CPR
Note one needs to show how passages taken out of context mean something different in their proper context. You have not done that, you just keep appealing to the Whole of the CPR, which in this case is nothing more than the whole of your questionable interpretation of the text.
My point is this "unknown something' is ultimately an illusion [Kant expressed it in many ways].
The only illusion here is imagining that simply repeating the same thing over and over again will make it true. You claim that Kant expressed it in many ways but have not provided even one example.
I used to rely totally on 'highly regarded' scholars and I have read many of such books on Kant.
This is a dodge intended to dismiss Kantian scholarship in favor of your insular views, and disingenuous since you do not acknowledge your reliance on Norman Kemp Smith’s notion of Kant’s development in order to explain away what runs counter to your interpretation.
Note even Guyer and Allison who both had studied Kant for more than 50 years each still disagree with each other on who is right on Kant.
Yes, I pointed this out in response to your saying that you spent three years reading the text. There are always interpretive differences, but your lone voice in the wilderness shtick ain’t cutting it.
Kant in CPR wrote:
There will therefore be Syllogisms which contain no Empirical premisses, and by means of which we conclude from something which we know to something else of which we have no Concept, and to which, owing to an inevitable Illusion, we yet ascribe Objective Reality.
The key term here is Objective Reality. What is an illusion is that we can conclude anything about them, which includes ascribing Objective Reality to things in themselves as well as concluding they are an illusion.
Let me try another analogy. Suppose there is a locked room with a keyhole you can look through. Would you conclude that the only things in the room are those you can see through the keyhole? The limits of what you can see are not the limits of what is in the room. Analogously, the limits of what can be known should not be taken as the limits of what is. This is what Kantian humility is all about, not drawing conclusions about what we cannot know.
They [thing-in-itself as ideas] are sophistications not of men but of Pure Reason itself.
‘They’ refers to the conclusion or inference that from something with which we are acquainted to something of which we have no concept, and yet
to which we nevertheless, by an unavoidable illusion, give objective reality. In other words, we cannot get from the subjective knowledge to objective reality. He goes on to identify three species of such syllogisms:
There are, therefore, only three species of these dialectical syllogisms, as many as there are ideas in which their conclusions result. In
the first class of syllogisms, from the transcendental concept of a subject that contains nothing manifold I infer the absolute unity of this subject itself, even though in this way I have no concept at all of it. This dialectical inference I will call a transcendental paralogism. The second class of sophistical inference is applied in general to the transcendental concept of absolute totality in the series of conditions for a given appearance; and from the fact that I always have a self-contradictory concept of the unconditioned synthetic unity in the series on one side, I infer the correctness of the opposite unity, even though I also have no concept of it. I will call the condition of reason with regard to these dialectical inferences the antinomy of pure reason. Finally, in the third kind of sophistical inference, from the totality of conditions for thinking objects in general insofar as they can be given to me I infer the absolute synthetic unity of all conditions for the possibility of things in general; i.e., from things with which I am not acquainted as to their merely transcendental concept, I infer a being of all beings, with which I am even less acquainted through its transcendental a concept, and of whose unconditioned necessity I can make for myself no concept at all. This dialectical syllogism I will call the ideal of pure reason.
They refer respectively to self, the universe, and God. It is not that the self, the universe, and God are illusions, but rather, the illusion is that we can have objective knowledge of them. Your lack of humility leads you to go further and deny their existence.
I am confident I have mastered the whole theme of the CPR …
You are, as Socrates would say, ignorant of your ignorance. This is another form of your lack of humility.
Burning ghost:
Can we just simply sum this up and say what we can never know (lack the capacity to know) is no thing.
The problem is the ambiguity of the term ‘thing’ or ‘object’. A thing in itself would be a transcendent rather than transcendental object. It is for us no thing because it is not something that we can be cognizant of. Kant does not, however, draw the conclusion from this that the thing in itself is an illusion of pure reason. It is simply a recognition of our limits. The illusion occurs when we attempt to go beyond those limits. This is, as I said, problematic, but I think it is what Kant says.
The “illusion” is assuming we can know what we lack the facilities to comprehend.
I agree.
If all humans were born blind we’d still be able to appreciate the idea of “colour” without anyone experiencing colour.
All analogies eventually break down and don’t want to get bogged down on the issue of secondary qualities. It may be that they see red when pressing on their eyelids, but I see no reason why the question of color with regard to objects in the world would even arise. They would have no concept of the visual world. If an alien species were to communicate with blind earthlings and say anything about the visible world, a philosophically uninformed earthling might think the visible world is just an illusion.