@@KombatKompanion-yd2cu You've misunderstood what I was saying - to make a rather pompous point about Kant that any beginner knows. No if you're wondering I do not consider Einstein a Kantian ''epistemologist'' - which, by the way, is a characterisation of Kant's work by later analytic schools of thought and not actually how Kant considered himself. Since epistemology as a sub-branch that followed from Kant's incredibly abstract and metaphysical philosophy can consider gravitation to be ''a priori'', and in fact Kant's opinion of whether or not gravitational forces are a priori or a posteriori is far more complicated than the beginner's refresher on Kant you've written there. Michael Friedman has published academic articles on the subject I'll quote slightly from to give the general point of view to an outsider, which is by no means sufficient to solve the issue; Kant muddles the waters between laws discoverable in objects of intuition that the understanding puts forth and natural laws that were discovered in experience, especially within the ''Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics'' for example. In paragraph 37 ''the laws, which we discover in objects of sensible intuition, especially if they are cognized as necessary, are indeed held by us to be such as the understanding has placed there, although they are equally similar otherwise in all respects to natural laws that we ascribe to experience.'' And this is especially ambigious when Kant is talking of *gravitation* which was the key concept to my original claim that Kant's thoughts on space and time *through their interaction with gravity* may be more complicated than this documentary, being a simplification of it, explained. Einstein of course, I am not implying believed the a priori **metaphysical** approach of philosophy was Einstein's experimental method since Einstein was an empiricist.

@@KombatKompanion-yd2cu I made a claim about gravitational forces and necessary laws in Kant's philosophy having a fundamental relevance to Einstein's discovery of space and time. Would you address to me, kind sir, then if I am mistaken - what would be the correct view regarding Kant's theories of gravitation and the interactions between time and space that gravitation embodies through necessary cause and effect? I was making a claim about gravitation.

​@@KombatKompanion-yd2cu Now here you have touched on something of incredible interest, my friend. I think when you claim that ''Space-time are mental constructs for Kant. They apply to our experience of reality, not reality itself'' You do the same thing Kant was trying to warn us to avoid as a philosophical erring, and slipping aside from the righteous path of the rational metaphysician along the crooked paths of idealism a la Berkley's denial of reality as just a by-product of our sense-experience, ''esse est percipi''. In B275 ''Idealism (I mean material idealism) is the theory which declares the existence of objects in space outside us'' Kant says, is ''not demonstrable.'' He seems keen to refute such an idealism - which he names ''dogmatic idealism'', to oppose it to sceptical idealism, like Descartes' disbelief in an external world as a byproduct of a malin génie controlling our perception - what was Kant's rejection of Descartes predicated upon if not a denial of the outer world? Kant emphasized ''inner experience, which Descartes considers as undoubted, is possible only on the supposition of outer experience.'' The example of gravitation curving the field of forces that determine space and time, external to our perception, with the perception of iron filings changing on a visual plane, is used by Kant in the portion of the book just before: [The Postulates of Empirical Thoughts In General] ''The postulate concerning our knowledge of the actuality of things requires perception, and therefore sensation of which we are conscious; it does not, indeed, require immediate perception of the object itself the existence of which is to be known, yet it does require a connection between it and some actual perception, according to the analogies of experience, which expound all real connections in an experience in general.'' A224 So in fact, according to Kant, gravitational forces that pull things together can be real if they, analogy-wise, have a real connection to an experience in general, and I wasn't jumping to the conclusion that Kant discovered relativity or even thought in the same terms as Einstein directly, but that analogically. You can't ''see'' an atom. After all, the uses of analogy in physics are well known to physicists - they know that an atom does not actually appear in nature visibly the same as its diagram which is in fact only an analogy of real forces in a pictorial representation named an atom, not an atom itself. ''For in that case the existence of a thing is bound up at least with our perceptions in a possible experience, and, guided by our analogies, we can start from our actual perception and arrive at the thing found in the series of possible perceptions. Thus we know the existence of a magnetic matter pervading all bodies, from the perception of the attracted iron filings, even though our organs are so constituted as to render an immediate perception of that matter impossible.'' A226 Kant

@@KombatKompanion-yd2cu Your reading is sympomatic of neokantism dogmatic failures that, for some reason, are still circulating like weeds in the public space and university teachings alike.

Arthur Schopenhauer has built his philosophy on the foundation constructed by Kant. In his famous shez d'oeuvres "The World as Will and Representation" (or as Idea) he strongly supports the Kant's views on time and space as a conditional part of our reality, i.e. an idea. Kant has indeed view time and space as a product of our sences different from reality or the "things in themselves" and quite opposite to Descartes' ideas (which I find rather absurd).

What is to be explained is a) observed movement of planets on the sky, b) knowledge. In the case of Copernicus/Kant the explanation involves both a) the movement of Earth and the planets around the sun, b) both subject and object. In the case of Ptolemy, you have only the movement of the planets around the sun, corresponding to the framework where object alone is regarded as essential for knowledge. That's the analogy. I'm not sure where Aristotle would fit into this scheme, though.

To each's own. I personally didn't even notice it until you mentioned it. Once I did, I found it was more soothing and complementary than distracting.