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Front Page  Titles (by Subject) Hayek\'s Kantian Philosophy of Mind - Literature of Liberty, Winter 1982, vol. 5, No. 4
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Hayek's Kantian Philosophy of Mind - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Winter 1982, vol. 5, No. 4 [1982]Edition used:Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.
Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982
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Hayek's Kantian Philosophy of MindI began by nothing the striking Kantian attributes of Hayek's epistemology and philosophy of mind—aspects which Hayek himself does not stress, perhaps because he conceives the formative influence of Kantian philosophy on his thought to be self-evident. As he puts it himself in a footnote to his discussion in a recent volume of the government of conscious intellectual life by super-conscious abstract rules: “I did not mention...the obvious relation of all this to Kant's conception of the categories that govern our thinking—which I took rather for granted.”26 Hayek's Kantianism is seen, first in his repudiation of the empiricist view that knowledge may be constructed from a basis of raw sensory data and, second, in his uncompromising assertion of the view that the order we find in the world is a product of the creative activity of the human mind (rather than a recognition of natural necessity). His Kantian view is distinctive in that it anticipates Popper in affirming that our mental frameworks by which we categorize the world are neither universal nor invariant, but alterable in an evolutionary fashion; his Kantian view also follows Wittgenstein in grasping the role of social rules in the transmission of practical knowledge. Hayek's Kantian view is original, finally, in recognizing a hierarchy in the rules that govern our perceptions and actions, and in insisting that the most fundamental of these rules are “super-conscious” and beyond any possibility of specification or articulation. [26.] Hayek, µB-17Õ, New Studies, p. 45, footnote 14. |
