Talk:Reason

General comments on improving aspects

Dear Max,

Though you have taken a very broad topic that requires knowing well the viewpoints of prominent philosophers, i.e. the journey you took was quite dangerous, you should have been more careful in your statements, reviewing better in the literature what the philosophers were actually meaning. It makes that some of the formulations you make are not very consistent, and there is a lack of sound referencing. It is difficult to separate in what extend you are stating something that can really supported by other authors because you haven't use a correct way of referencing.

Something else that obscures a bit your explanations is the lack of chronological referencing, to solve that when you first mention an author you put within brackets the year of birth and death, for instance, "Kant (1724-1804)".

When you speak about the difference between Descartes and Kant you take mistakenly Descartes' argument of the dreaming or hallucination as an argument to defend Descartes' schepticism. But actually he uses as a probe to show that there is something that endures, namely the thinking. He wanted to find an universal and necessary truth and the only he finds is that. Kant also agree that empirical inquiry cannot produce necessary and universal knowledge. However Kant sees more positively the achievement of objective truths through our experience, but only through the ideas that were put in the first place by our reason. That means that if the subject doesn't put it, they wouldn't get any empirical knowledge (which is contigent and particular, not universal and necessary).

Regarding the example of Saturn that you repeated in a later section, I have transformed it a bit in the first call to refer better Kant's approach, whereas I have deleated its second apparence.

With respect to the last section of "Reason: Neuroscience", I think this is something you can subsumm into the section in which you review the different accounts of reason.

All in all, if you take the comments in the box, the ones distributed within your text and the onen collected here, there's a number of improving aspects that can enhance signficantly the quality of the article. You can use this same tab to answer me back (using a separate section unter the epigraph "Reply of the author to the comments" about what changes are you intending to do or what you're not.

All the best, JM