Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Acceleration and Technical Reason

As Hume's Skepticism demonstrates, Empiricism seems to lack the capacity to ground any direct perception of the uniformly increasing Velocity entailed in the concept of Acceleration that is a foundation of Modern Physics.  On the other hand, while Rationalism can be the source of the Unity that is entailed in the perception of homogenized Motion, which would be required for Acceleration to be directly perceived, the application of a fixed concept to Motion seems problematic.  Now, a potential third alternative is proposed by Kant--his faculty of Schematism, which temporalizes his Categories.  So, if that faculty is, as he asserts, "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul", and not a mere ad hoc gimmick, then it, with a qualifier of Increase, could be the source of a direct perception of Acceleration.  Likewise for Technical Reason, if, as has been previously discussed, Schematism is an expression of that faculty. So, in the absence of a compelling rejection of Kant's discovery of Schematism--a rejection that is does not take for granted the kind of quasi-Dualism that, since Parmenides, Rationalists and Empiricists alike have been espousing--Technical Reason is the Epistemological ground of one of the foundations of Modern Physics.

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