Before: Theme 1

In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

Kato's theory states that instead of letting our cognition conform to objects, we could let objects conform to our cognition. At first, this makes for a bit of a confusing train of thought, but if you think about it for a minute or two - it does make sense. By letting our cognition conform to objects, we have to practice a posteriori, by empirically learning about the objects before we can "know" anything about the objects itself. Now, as we all know, this is not the case in real life as you may know answers to propositions even if you have no prior experience of the proposition itself. An often used analytical statement to demonstrate a priori is "All bachelors are unmarried". We do not need to go around to all bachelors, asking them if they are unmarried (and thus letting our cognition conform to the objects a posteriori, the objects here being bachelors) to know that they are - it is simply by analysing the proposition itself (and letting the objects conform to our cognition) that we a priori know the answer already. 

What Kato means here, is that technique of letting the objects conform to our cognition is quite handy when it comes to the studies and problems of metaphysics as we cannot empirically study these objects.

At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

I believe what Socrates means by saying that we do not hear and see "with" our eyes and ears, but rather "through" them, is that without our own perception, our eyes may receive photons on their retina and our eardrums may vibrate because of soundwaves without any further analysis of the information they have captured. We need our perception, our brain, our knowledge to perceive this information into something usable. Without perception, our eyes and ears are merely useless (well, they might look good on the face perhaps, but someone with perception has to know that for it to be useful).

Every now and then, you hear something new, perhaps a sound that you have never heard before. You have no definitive way of knowing exactly what it is, unless you turn your head and see what made the sound, but your minds most definitively tries to help you guess what the sound was even before you get a confirmation of the source of the sound. Perhaps it's a heavy and loud sound that you heard, then your mind would probably try to picture something large and not something small as a rock. These guesses are made because of your previous experiences, your own empiciral studies. You have seen and heard large objects before; trucks, trains, ventilation systems; and you know that they make these sort of loud noises sometimes, which gives your mind a "heads up" even before you know what made the sound.