درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant said that cognition (objective perception) is acquired in the unity of sensibility (the receptivity of the mind to receive empirical representations of things, which yields intuitions) and the understanding (in which concepts – general representations of things – arise), and is mediated by the imagination. Here, it is shown that numbers, either pure or denominate, are cognized in the synthesis of intuition and mathematical concept, and that the phenomenal world of the cognizer is shaped accordingly. Any number can be related to any other number through a general mathematical formula conceived by the cognizer for the purpose. The judgment of the cognizer is manifest in the specifics of the mathematical relationship established between the two numbers in cognition. If the cognized number is the numerical value of a physical constant then in the (consistent) phenomenal world it will always have been of the value found in cognition, which explains why the universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. If the cognized number is the numerical value of a physical variable, then the number will be subject to change in accordance with physical laws. Symmetry is a recurrent feature of the phenomenology. A mathematical formula conceived by the cognizer may also relate, one to one, the numerical values of quantities in one set with the numerical values of quantities of different dimensionality in another set, which suggests that physical laws are human inventions and that causality is a pure concept of the understanding.

Commentators oft cite the rather grand claim that for Hegel there was no concept of individual personality, subjectivity nor personal autonomy in Ancient Greece. Hegel’s claim is either taken as orthodox and making sense in the Hegelian historical system as a whole and so little discussed; or is flatly ignored as the worst kind of metaphysical obfuscation; a response a little too comfortable for liberal thinkers. Neither reaction is entirely satisfying. Not enough attention has been paid to it, especially for the vast majority of social and political thinkers who would find it at least contentious, so the present paper aims to assert its significance both for Hegelian politics as a whole and to pay enough attention to it in order to make it very difficult for those who find it a contentious statement to continue to ignore it. One wants to ask what it might mean for one’s self-understanding to be so radically different that, as a human being, I understand myself as first and foremost (and perhaps completely) not as a subjective individual. It is conceptually very difficult to be a self-conscious individual -- in even a minimal sense -- without some idea of being an atomic, individual unit. It is the claim of the following argument that a full understanding of this distinction, between ancient and modern self-understandings, would lead to a revision of Hegel’s liberal credentials, though not entirely for liberal reasons.