This is the third in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

My boy Hume had let me down. Contra Descartes he’d brought sense experience back into the realm of philosophy; and then he’d gone and blown it by deciding that we couldn’t really trust our sense experience to give us true knowledge about the world. And then we moved on to Immanuel Kant, and his Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Not shy, our Immanuel.

The Prologomena is a short book, and I read the whole thing. I’m not at all sure I understood any of it at that time, as it was horribly impenetrable. (I’m told the Critique of Pure Reason is much worse.) What I took away from it (combined with what I’ve learned since) is that Kant took that next step on from Hume. There is an objective reality—but our senses don’t give us true knowledge of it. Indeed, if I understand him correctly, he says we can’t know objective reality, and that the image of reality we do have is largely self-constructed.

But surely this is madness?

And so, I came away from my brief flirtation with philosophy with three clear and distinct ideas:

First: Trying to build a complete, correct philosophy of reality from a very few first principles is doomed to failure. The mathematical model simply does not work for philosophy. (I later found this to be truer than I had realized.)

Second: There’s no point in talking with people who deny objective reality. I don’t pretend that my knowledge of objective reality is perfect; clearly, it’s far from that. But it’s stupid to doubt what you can know directly, and I certainly have direct knowledge of objective reality. Further, the great success of science and technology over the last two hundred years shows that I’m not alone. We humans are really good at knowing objective reality when we work at it, and to deny this is to be willfully stupid. And there’s no point in arguing with people who can believe the absurd.

And this leads to the third point: Modern philosophy is bunk. There’s a reason why most people think philosophy is a waste of time: philosophers say dumb things which are obviously wrong. I might have stated that third point as simply, “Philosophy is bunk,” but I was dimly aware that I didn’t have the whole story. Plato had seemed to make sense, so far as I’d read him; and perhaps there had been something of value between Plato and Descartes.

By the end of the class, at the ripe old age of 18, I’d almost completely written off philosophy as a worthwhile field of endeavor.

Part IV