Choose one of the following topics to write on, or something else that interests you that you negotiate with me. Think in terms of about 2000 words. Follow the usual rules: print out the essay on one side only, double spaced, or using 1.5 spacing. No quoting or paraphrasing without proper citations. If you choose to rely on some outside reading and use some of the ideas you got from that reading, but you don't quote or paraphrase them, then be sure to nevertheless include a bibliography that includes your sources. (People deserve credit for their ideas; ideas are hard to come by.)
Topic 1
Assume Kant claims in the Second and Third Analogies that we humans must conceptualize the world as we experience it as consisting of a causally determined interconnected network of "objects" in order for that world to be objective. (This is Kant's view of what we today might call our "universe".) Is he right?
Topic 2
In the First Analogy Kant claims that we humans must conceptualize the world as we experience it as consisting of a fixed, unchanging quantity of "substance" (which he took to be matter, but which today would be assumed to be matter plus energy). ("Substance" is just whatever the whole universe is "made of".) The reason he gives why we must conceptualize the world in this way is that if we allowed for the possibility that the total quantity of substance varied over time, that would somehow undermine the "permanence" of time. Perhaps that means the objective time order would become somehow unstable. Wood suggests that Kant's argument has something to do with the impossibility of experiencing objective time all by itself -- one experiences objective time only by experiencing things that change, I suppose. But all of this is murky. Why couldn't I have a theory of the universe in which some stuff is leaking away into oblivion in some far galaxy? How would that undermine the conceptual framework required for a stable objective time framework for the world of experience? Or is Kant giving some entirely different argument for the First Analogy?