Last week I learned that Robert Paul Wolff, the philosopher who got interested in anarchism and marxism, died and I wanted to write something dedicated to him — this was the first reason I started writing this. The second one, was to finally finish an essay that I have in my /temp folder for at least 10 years, which my 20-year-old self titled “Why should I care?”. This essay, which came about as a regular attempt to say “Fuck authority!” remained unfinished, as I didn’t feel I was prepared to arrive at the necessary conclusions. Now, I realize why — my thoughts were in much conflict with most moral philosophy that is ever written, notably the moral philosophy of Kant, and the position of a 20-year-old who is saying everyone else are wrong, is too anti-intellectualistic me to take.

But now I know that I do have some allies, like the aforementioned Robert Paul Wolff, who tackles the same issues in his paper/blog post THE COMPLETION OF KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE TENETS OF THE RECHTSLEHRE. And that guy from Plato’s Republic (more on him later). So, I will attempt to finally express my thoughts of whether we are obliged to participate in society, and to treat all people, and their problems, in a way that society wants us to treat.

As an experiment, I decided to leave what I wrote before unchanged and unedited, and then continue with my current thoughts. So here we go:

Hi. Let’s wait for more people to show up… Or it’s just us? OK. So listen up, I wrote this very cool post that gathers almost all my mathematical and philosophical interests in one place…

OK, whaterver, if you are not interested I will stop.

OK, let’s try again _ clears throat _ “The age-old mystery of Kant’s triads has baffled academics for centuries: what is the significance of the third element that finishes each of his triad. And is it possible that the categories were given to Kant by aliens?”

What, now it’s too dramatic? No, impossible, Kant never used any drugs! OK, whatever, I give up, no more introductions for these articles, let’s just get on with it!

Lately, I’ve been exploring this book, which I will refer to as simply “The critique” from now on, by following the lectures by Robert Paul Wolff and decided to put my notes here in case someone finds them useful. This is a summary. The ideas expressed in it belong to Immanuel Kant. The phrase “Kant thinks” can accompany each sentence from it, but it is omitted for brevity and ease of reading. But at the same time, it is not objective - I am interpreting the ideas in the book the way I understand them, which may or may not be the way your philosophy professor interprets them. Also, the text is not in any way a substitute of reading the book itself - rather my aim was for it to help people who read the book by providing an additional viewpoint into what is happening in it.

I put my original research in a separate article about Kant’s categories.

Kant’s principle: If there is only one of it (and there cannot ever be more), then it’s probably imaginary e.g. time, space, god, self…

Corrolary: You only truly understand the things that you yourself made up. And so if you think you truly understand something, either you are wrong or you made that thing up.