Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (Reflection)

After one week filled with discussions about Kant, Plato, epistemology and how everything fits together, I feel like I can finally grasp at least some concepts of knowledge, which were introduced by Kant. 

To prepare for this lecture I first read the German version of "Critique of Pure Reason" by Kant, hoping that the original might be more understandable. Still there were so many terms I didn't know, that I had to look up most of them in philosophical dictionaries. After that I read the English version, as well as Plato's Theaetetus. In total, it was a "step-by-step" progress. During the first lecture I took notes of what we discussed and that helped me during the seminar to follow Johan through the discussion. 

In the seminar we discussed how Kant suggested, that we should climb down from God's point of view and investigate knowledge from our point of view instead. We discussed this in my small group during the seminar, unsure what to make out of this metaphor of God's point of view. Johan explained that everything we observe is tainted by our history, sex, language and knowledge. It's impossible to completely block out this prior knowledge. We cannot make, as in God's sense, untainted observations. Therefore the conception of scientific knowledge is just a dream. 

We also discussed, how we can know anything a priori, if we can't potentially have posteriori knowledge beforehand. To know that all bachelors are unmarried (a typical a priori analytical judgement), we simply know that the word bachelor refers to an unmarried man (a typical posteriori knowledge). However, Kant never discussed this. Instead, he discussed the most basic forms, e.g. space and time. Furthermore the categories structure a priori knowledge and as Kant says, we can only see the world structured through categories.