Primacy of Perception & The war has taken place - Mijn lesaantekeningen

9 important questions on Primacy of Perception & The war has taken place - Mijn lesaantekeningen

MP proposes to generalize his theory: what does he mean exactly?

He wants to generalize the changing, ambiguous, situated, and contradictory character of perception to every field of knowledge. Every consciousness is perceptive consciousness.

MP addresses an objection against his generalization that every consciousness is perceptive consciousness. What is this objection, and how does he discard it?

Scientific knowledge would be heterogenous to this perceptive consciousness. 
But even science has a history of struggle, being challenged by the facts. You will always start and return to perceptions in science. The ideal of absolute knowledge will never be reached

According to MP every thought and not only perception, possesses horizons: what does that mean?

A horizon is what exists only in relation with a particular standpoint, it is what appears far away, sometimes blurred and confused manner, but can still be further explored.
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What does the crisis of rationality around the wartimes pertain to?

The crisis was caused by the realisation that the project of enlightenment caused ideologies that resulted in the death and suffering of many people. Also the sciences developed well (mainly in tools to kill people) but they failed to address existential big picture questions. So around the wartime, the crisis was a chance to save what was left of rationalism, but that led to denying the reality of the irrationality of the wars going on.

"After June of 1940 we really  entered the war": what are the radical changes described by MP in this paragraph?

France got occupied by nazi Germany.
They could not uphold their Kantian ethics as had moral duty to treat the germans without respect.

For what four reasons did the french idealists have to be childish about their treatment of the Germans?

1. Treating them cordially would be an approval of their victory
2. And approval of how they treated Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals
3. They were treated unfairly as Frenchmen and it would have been immoral and imprudent not to return the offense
4. German authorities did not treat Jews as human beings.

Why was anti-semitism a mystery for MP and his friends?

Anti-semitism is not comprehensible in the framework of the idealist philosophy, where people are essentially reasonable beings. But no rational explanation could justly explain what was going on.

Like actors, everyone "carries a great phantom": What does that mean? What three properties do the phantoms have?

1. They are created through our social and historical roles. (they exist through biases, propaganda, fantasies, and through many different minds and institutions)
2. They possess a truly effective power and contribute to shaping who we are. (They emerge in a social network bigger than us, so we do not fully control them.)
3. They are not full-fledged real forces (as something independent of us), we can challenge these roles and try to modify them.

In the last paragraph of the excerpt, MP nuances his critique of idealism. What is his stance exactly?

The war and occupation only taught him that values remain nominal and indeed have no value without an economic and political infrastructure to make them participate in existence.

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