Clark could not understand why the lights were not coming on. He checked all the bulbs, checked all the fuses, he had paid the electric bill, there shouldn’t be any reason that the lights shouldn’t come on. But they weren’t. He went to fumble around with his setup, perhaps he had missed something. Ellen stood by to see if Clark could find the missing piece to his Christmas spectacle, and then all of a sudden, the house lit up, so much that the shine of them blinded the neighbors trying to enjoy a romantic evening across the way.
Turns out the reason for the lights not lighting up was due to the switch in the basement that seemed to also control the outside outlet with the many plugs into it. Clark must have had the worst fire hazard possible with his Christmas light extraordinaire. I’ve had homes where you couldn’t watch TV and run the microwave at the same time because it would blow the service line. Mine was only a 10-amp line if I remember in the home, I lived in just across from the Fort Bridger post office so, we made do, and remembered to not make popcorn while the TV and heater were running. If we wanted popcorn while the movie was playing, we had to freeze for a bit.
By definition reason is:
- a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.
verb
think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.
Immanuel Kant was a philosopher in the 18th century, whose main focus was metaphysics and epistemology or how we know things. In his work Critique of Pure Reason, he sought out to analyze the breadth of human understanding, what we can know and how we can accomplish gaining of knowledge. First, we must believe that we are free thinkers, uninhibited or bound by any sort of barrier for understanding the world. Second, we must distinguish knowledge in two forms:
- Knowledge that is priori or without experience
- Knowledge that is a posteriori or empirically gained knowledge
Metaphysics for Kant concerns with a priori knowledge, knowledge that does not involve experience, and the a priori knowledge is reason.
Knowledge of mathematics is a priori, well generally speaking, you have to learn mathematics, but the presence of mathematics exists without anyone having to experience it. This would be what Kant refers to the “thing-inside-the thing”. We are able to observe appearances of objects empirically, for instance a tree, the appearance of the tree at the time we observe it has been subjected to space and time for the current state that the tree appears to us. At any other point it could have been a smaller tree, or even the beginnings of a tree, but a tree none-the-less. The real “tree” is not known to us, it is part of a blueprint so to speak of what a true tree can be or the functionalities and capabilities of the tree.
When Clark finds his tree, it is the most glorious tree that he has ever seen, however freezing out in the meadow Russ asks, “Dad did you bring a saw?”
Author: admin
Obviously my interests include philosophy. I think thinking and thought are the beginning of every great thing. It’s how we understand and perceive the world. Periodically I’ll change things up and blog about something math or computer science related or even a blog about mythology. I am not political, trendy, or savvy, but I do like a good story. That is why I try and find a movie clip that hints or encompasses what I want to blog about. Sometimes the relevance is there, sometimes it’s a reach and I just really love the movie that I put in the post. The intent and purpose of my blog is to make you think, make me think and together our thoughts can be shared in a collection of material.