From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon 16 Feb 2004 - 00:58:54 GMT
This is a very preliminary view, but in reading through the first parts
of Durkheim's _The Elementary Forms of Religious Life_ (I have two
separate translations to go by), it seems that Durkheim is grounding
Kant's categories in the social realm, that is that categories of
thought are socially imposed upon us from without. This could be a
reversal of Kant's view in his _Prolegomena_ that we impose our laws
upon nature. For Durkheim, our laws would instead be imposed upon us
from collective representations that have been established through the
generations.
It would be interesting to compare Durkheim's views with those of Popper
in _Objective Knowledge_ where the categories would IIRC instead derive
from within via an evolutionary process of conjecture and refutation.
Popper's views would be much more aligned with those of evolutionary
psychology than Durkheim's would be.
Popper and ev psychers would say that Kant's a priori categories are an
evolutionary derived natural given, where Durkheim seems to be arguing
that they came from the social milieu.
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