Kant's Perceiver

Inquiry, 2012

Both parties in the active philosophical debate concerning the conceptual character of perception trace their roots back to Kant's account of sensible intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason. This striking fact can be attributed to Kant's tendency both to assert and to deny the involvement of our conceptual capacities in sensible intuition. He appears to waver between these two positions in different passages, and can thus seem thoroughly confused on this issue. But this is not, in fact, the case, for, as I will argue, the appearance of contradiction in his account stems from the failure of some commentators to pay sufficient attention to Kant's developmental approach to philosophy. Although he begins by asserting the independence of intuition, Kant proceeds from this nonconceptualist starting point to reveal a deeper connection between intuitions and concepts. On this reading, Kant's seemingly conflicting claims are actually the result of a careful and deliberate strategy for gradually convincing his readers of the conceptual nature of perception.

Con-textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy, 2020

Kant uses terms translatable as ‘synthesis’ and ‘perception’ in different ways in different contexts, which suggests that there are different kinds of synthesis and perception. I propose that there are two main basic functions of perception according to Kant: that of singling out a thing and that of getting perceptually informed about the configuration of the thing’s perceptible features. I argue that the first function is not dependent on the kinds of syntheses Kant analyzes in the Critique of Pure Reason but grounds any such synthesis. I also argue that if singling out a thing is considered to involve synthesis, then the term ‘synthesis’ is identified with a unification of sensory information itself, which is not of much consequence for the transcendental philosopher. The paper also aims to clarify what ‘manifold’ consist s in and what the starting point of the ‘synthesis in apprehension’ might be.

2012

In order to secure the limits of the critical use of reason, and to succeed in the critique of speculative metaphysics, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had to present a full account of human cognitive experience. Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience is a detailed investigation of this aspect of Kant’s grand enterprise with a special focus: perception. The overarching goal is to understand this common phenomenon both in itself and as the key to understanding Kant’s views of experience. In the process, the author argues against any such reading of Kant that puts too much emphasis on concepts and understanding in perception. This means that claims of the sort that intuitions cannot play their role without concepts, that sensibility cannot bring anything to cognition without being mediated through the functions of understanding, or that there is no such thing as concept-independent perception, are shown to be either plainly false or misleading at best. Together with the contemporary topics examined by the end of the book, the findings suggest how the role of conceptual thinking in human cognition has been exaggerated partly because of a misplaced interpretation of Kant, which not only makes perception far more intellectual in character than what was intended by Kant himself, but distorts Kant’s account of cognition by overlooking what there is at the heart of his critical philosophy: the revaluation of sensible cognition.

On the sensible and intelligible worlds, eds N. Stang and K. Schafer, Oxford 2015

The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds (OUP)

In this essay, I develop a unified account Kant's conception of Erkenntnis or cognition and show that this conception generates two crucial constraints on cognition of an object: (i) a real possibility constraint and (ii) a determinate content constraint. In doing so, I stress the differences between Kant's conception of cognition and our contemporary conception of propositional knowledge, while connecting together important strands in the recent scholarly literature on these topics. Finally, I make use of this improved understanding of cognition to better understand why Kant claims that we cannot cognize things-in-themselves, while also appearing to claim that we can know a good deal about what things-in-themselves are like.

In chapter 15 of Kant's Thinker, Patricia Kitcher claims that we can treat Kant as ‘our contemporary’, and that his theory of apperception ‘offers “new” and plausible perspectives on issues of considerable recent interest.’ I question this with respect to two of her four chosen topics. First, I address her attempt to show that Kant's theory of apperceptive self-knowledge is immune to sceptical doubts of the sort Barry Stroud presents. Second, I turn to her argument that this theory is superior to current accounts of the special authority of self-knowledge. Over and above special weaknesses, it seems that Kitcher's considerations lack sufficient reflection on how philosophical arguments of the past can be relevant to current agendas.

In this paper I argue against a dominant way of reading Kant according to which he thinks that we cannot be perceptually presented with, or represent, objective particulars independently of our applying, or having the ability to apply, concepts, and in particular the categories, to these particulars. I argue that, for Kant, the application of concepts is not necessary for our being perceptually presented with particulars: the role of intuition is to present us with particulars, and it does not depend on concepts to play this role. First I present textual evidence against John McDowell’s very strong and influential claim that intuition does not make an even notionally separable contribution to cognition. Then I respond to the considerations from the Transcendental Deduction that lead commentators to the strong conceptualist reading. I argue that we must distinguish between perceiving a particular and experiencing an object in the full-blown sense which is Kant’s concern in the Deduction.

Kant's Philosophy of the Unconscious, 2012

A question that has gone unasked for a long time in Kant research is whether and to what extent, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the central concept of apperception or the so-called transcendental or original selfconsciousness implies a form of concrete consciousness beyond purely formal and functional characteristics. It is thought to be entirely uncontroversial that that which produces objective knowledge and which Kant denoted with the concept of apperception only has transcendentally necessary significance and is entirely inaccessible to concrete consciousness. This deeply entrenched interpretation can be explained by programmatic reasons above all, whereby the lesson of the paralogisms chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason plays an important role. Here Kant shows that there can be no justification for assuming a Cartesian soul that would be accessible to knowledge. This can only make it seem substantially wrong-headed to wish to interpret the consciousness involved in apperception, which according to Kant underlies all structured thought, as a form of phenomenal consciousness that could somehow be made apparent from the first-person perspective. One could even argue that the very attempt to locate any phenomenal self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason is contrary to the entire project of the critique of knowledge, since Kant is concerned to justify propositional knowledge through conditions that are independent of experience and can be legitimately applied to the material of empirical intuition. This sort of approach necessitates a strict distinction in the theory between a priori structures on the one hand and empirical or psychological aspects of the consciousness of objects on the other hand-a distinction famously reflected in the Critique of Pure Reason in the sharp terminological oppositions of attributes such as "empirical" and "pure/transcendental", "a priori" and "a posteri-1 This paper was originally published in German in 2007 under the title "Vorbegriffliches Selbstbewusstsein bei Kant?". Translation by Karsten Schçllner.

Ergo, 2015

My aim in this paper is to offer a systematic analysis of a feature of Kant’s theory of perception that tends to be overlooked, viz., his account of how the imagination forms images in perception. Although Kant emphasizes the centrality of this feature of perception, indeed, calling it a ‘necessary ingredient’ of perception, commentators have instead focused primarily on his account of sensibility and intuitions, on the one hand, and understanding and concepts, on the other. However, I show that careful attention to what he says about the nature of images, their connection to the imagination, and their role in perception in his Metaphysics Lectures, as well as in the Deduction and Schematism chapters of the first Critique reveals that Kant is working with a richer, more nuanced framework for perception than is often attributed to him. I contend that it is only once we have a revised framework for Kant’s theory of perception in place that we will be able to make further headway in debates, e.g., about whether or not he is a conceptualist about perception.