For many of us it’s of highest importance to be heard/understood, to have (at least parts of) a society that truly listens. This point is deeply connected to the question what empathy really means in my opinion and here is why I think that/where I see the connection.

First question here is what understood here means: more being emotionally understood, or also intellectually understood, like someone responding to the deeper meaning behind your given words? Symbolism behind our words give even more connection and also connection to the real person behind the words I would say as our society encourages to create more and more masks to retain stable.

Now some people follow exactly that and play empathic just to escape the current disharmony in the room but stop there. They don‘t reflect if they really reached the real person. Real empathy just begins there. A green flag of question after this reflection could be: Did the person really catch my transfered feeling? Even if it wouldn’t be emotional more logical, the core point here is the will to reflect and think again about how the real person reacted to you - at “best”, until you do know that you can‘t feel secure (of course not 100% sure, that would mostly lead to endless overthinking).

Speak and deal with the values of the other (real) person, place your intentions appropriate - emotional or logical, also depending on what the person needs at that moment! - at them, then true bonds for you both will arise.

Question to myself: “When can I recognize that people are serious about me, and that I do not have to be afraid of being abandoned?” This question suggests to me that what is being sought here is a rather practical and direct answer, one that is meant to be suitable for everyday life. Well… You can judge this very well in people by the extent of unpleasant things they are willing to overlook for you. In emergencies or bad times, surface and true self almost completely collapse into one another - and then you can almost directly read off the authenticity and true answer you desire.

Question to myself: “Why do you find piercings objectionable? They can express uniqueness on my body, express my inner self better.” I do not think so: because by doing so, you lie to (the whole) society. Through the purest unnatural - since metallic - materialism, you suggest a change, while in fact you have only changed your public mask. And as soon as society approaches you, you are still the same person as before - and this contradiction often and quickly creates confusion, especially in very sense-oriented people.

I considered whether it is necessary for knowledge and perception to be identical, but I would say: they must both be present, but they do not have to be identical. Thus, different manifestations of the other object can exist in different kinds of perceptions, while inwardly there is a kind of knowledge about the object. Now one could, by chance, choose a manifestation of the perceptions and reject the manifestation of knowledge in the understanding. That would then be a subjective action, which now arises because the manifestation can be brought into contradiction with oneself, whereby another object, distinct from me, emerges, corresponding to a subjective choice. An objective action would be when knowledge about knowledge is present, and when knowledge, knowledge about knowledge, and perception are identical. If no knowledge is present, we are blocked in the understanding, because several manifestations from different forms of perception exist and all are equivalent in the present state. The terminology of “action,” since it is defined as a relation to a fixed entity, is then not well-formed. If only knowledge is present, then for me, as object 1, it is not clear whether I am currently standing in relation to another object at all - the relation could then be empty.

This was posed on MathOverflow on December 8th in 2025.

Antoine Loivisier once said that “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”. This is an interesting thesis but actually, the whole of logic speaks against that. The choice of a formal language and of a calculus can produce equivalent results. But as long as I do not know the actual state of affairs, the other calculus-interpretation is my truth, and only such a representation can be part of my own knowledge - so several representatives are equivalently true for the “receiver” in each case, but they are not a transformation, because that would presuppose that the receiver is even capable of identifying a contradiction at all. Perhaps there is something to Hegel’s dialectic after all.

This was posed on MathOverflow on April 15th in 2026.

This was posed on MathOverflow on April 22nd in 2026.

This was posed on Philosophy Stack Exchange on June 10th in 2024.

The post was:

In paragraph B151 of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), he defines the imagination as follows:

Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition.

However, from the very first line of the Transcendental Ascetic, intuition is defined as everything related to the cognition of objects. These two definitions taken together introduce something of a contradiction, as one cannot define an object outside of intuition when intuition itself is defined as relating only to objects. It seems, however, that in intuition is used throughout the text basically synonymously with in sensibility. Am I correct is claiming that intuition in the CPR in fact has two different meanings, one when referring to something as an intuition, and another when speaking of something in intuition?

My answer:

I think the main misunderstanding here originates from the given translation. I will therefore try to resolve the confusion by taking the German original as I am German native. First, I don’t see Kant saying at the beginning of the “Transzendentale Ästhetik” that only intuition has any relation to objects. He says that intuition is that representation through which cognition relates to objects immediately. Then he adds that through sensibility objects are given to us, through the understanding they are thought. So the opening distinction is not “object vs. no object” but “given vs. thought” and more precisely “immediate relation vs. mediate relation.” Your question generates confusion because it implicitly replaces “immediate relation to objects” with “all relation to objects.” I don’t think that this stronger claim was Kant’s intension. But other logical coherent interpretations are of course always possible.

Now apply that to B151. The sentence imo must be parsed as: “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, [einen Gegenstand] auch [ohne [dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung]] vorzustellen.” So what is negated by “ohne” is not “Anschauung” as such, but the object’s “Gegenwart in der Anschauung”. In plain German: Kant is not saying that imagination represents an object “outside intuition altogether”; he is saying that imagination represents an object although the object is not presently there for intuition. A maybe better German paraphrase is: “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch dann vorzustellen, wenn der Gegenstand der Anschauung nicht gegenwärtig ist.”

Here “Gegenwart” means “Anwesenheit / Zugegensein”, not “the present” in a merely temporal sense, and not some abstract ontological “presence.” Contemporary dictionaries around Kant’s time make this very clear: Adelung says “Anwesend” is still fully current for “gegenwärtig”; “Anwesen” is glossed by “in meiner Gegenwart”; “Abwesend” is “nicht gegenwärtig” and “Daseyn” in one sense is literally “die Gegenwart an einem Orte.” So in B151 the relevant meaning is the object’s being-there for intuition, its intuitive or sensible presence.

Kant himself confirms this meaning in two other texts btw. In the Prolegomena, §8, he says that intuition is a representation “as if” it depended immediately on the presence of the object, and then explicitly raises the problem how a priori intuition is possible. His answer in §§9-10 is that a priori intuition is possible only because what is given a priori is not the thing itself, but the form of sensibility. And in the Anthropologie, §15, he formulates the distinction almost schematically: “Sinn” is the faculty of intuition in the object’s presence; “Einbildungskraft” is intuition without the object’s presence. Then §28 repeats the point: imagination is the faculty of intuitions even without the object’s presence, either productive or reproductive. So B151 is not an isolated odd sentence; it is the Kantian distinction between “Sinn” and “Einbildungskraft”.

This way there is also no contradiction with Kant’s later claims about cognition. In B151-52 he says that imagination belongs to sensibility, because only under that subjective condition can it provide a corresponding intuition to concepts; but because its synthesis is spontaneity, it can determine sensibility a priori. Then in §22 he says explicitly that thinking an object and cognizing an object are not the same: cognition requires both concept and intuition. So imagination does not give us knowledge of objects outside sensibility. It gives or better: re-gives intuitive material under the forms of sensibility, while understanding thinks that material under concepts.

This was posed on MathOverflow on March 17th in 2026.