Kant as Both Conceptualist and Nonconceptualist

Golob, Sacha

doi:10.1017/s1369415416000248

Cited by 30 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…He begins by noting that imagination plays a central role for Kant in the generation of time (Smith, 2015:111). This is absolutely correct: as I have argued elsewhere, the full story is that the act of iterating the basic measure is successive because it is such action, or "motion of the subject", that first generates the pure intuition of time by affecting inner sense (Golob, 2016). The details of that story are highly complex and not relevant here.…”

mentioning

confidence: 85%

Can there be a Finite Interpretation of the Kantian Sublime?

Golob¹

2019

Kant Yearbook

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Kant’s account of the sublime makes frequent appeals to infinity, appeals which have been extensively criticised by commentators such as Budd and Crowther. This paper examines the costs and benefits of reconstructing the account in finitist terms. On the one hand, drawing ona detailed comparison of the first and third Critiques, I argue that the underlying logic of Kant’s position is essentially finitist. I defend the approach against longstanding objections, as well as addressing recent infinitist work by Moore and Smith. On the other hand, however, I argue that finitism faces distinctive problems of its own: whilst the resultant theory is a coherent and interesting one, it is unclear in what sense it remains an analysis of the sublime. I illustrate the worry by juxtaposing the finitist reading with analytical cubism.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 85%

Can there be a Finite Interpretation of the Kantian Sublime?

Golob¹

2019

Kant Yearbook

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: The Impasse In the Modern Non-conceptualism Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the very least, there is enough ambiguity in Kant's sprawling system to allow this debate to persist without a conclusive resolution. Some have tried to dispel this ambiguity by reading Kant as a moderate state non‐conceptualist (see Allais, 2009; Golob, 2016; Tomaszewska, 2014). But if this reading of Kant is accurate, then Hanna and Chadha's brand of essentialist content non‐conceptualism would not be distinctly “Kantian.” More importantly, Kant's state non‐conceptualism could fall prey to some of the objections against the state view, and would hence fail as an independently viable version of the non‐conceptualist thesis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking non‐conceptualism back to Dharmakīrti

Chaturvedi

2022

European J of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function is necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go "back to Kant" to find the most defensible version of an essentialist content non-conceptualism. I propose instead that non-conceptualists go back even further to the 7th century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, so that they may not only find historical precedent for an essentialist content view, but also some better arguments in its favor. This essay reconstructs Dharmakīrti's essentialist non-conceptualism about the contents of conscious sensory representations, and the refined theory of conceptualization that it presupposes. In particular, I examine his arguments from the proprietary phenomenology of sensory experience, the cognitive encapsulation of sensory processing, as well as the iconic format of sensory representations, and assess the strength of these arguments relative to their modern counterparts. **Due to journal word limits, Sanskrit text and translations are mostly absent in the published version.

show abstract

“…Their example is meant to show how Kant envisions the newborn's pre‐conceptual awareness and tracking of determinate particulars, one distinct from the synthesis‐involving attention “Kant takes to be required for full‐blown experience” (p. 576). They argue the attention distinctive to synthesis occurs when Zoë ceases to regard the string merely as “sudden or striking sensations” and takes the varied appearances of the string to all be “the same persisting thing ” seen in a multitude of contexts (587; see also Golob, 2016, p. 374). Accordingly, the neonate already at birth attends and tracks determinate particulars in some sense prior to and independent of synthesis.…”

Section: The Determinate Particulars Thesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Kant and the determinacy of intuition

Browning

2022

European J of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A central issue in debates about Kant and nonconceptualism concerns the nature of intuition. There is sharp disagreement among Kant scholars about both whether, prior to conceptualization, mere intuition can be considered conscious and, if so, how determinate this consciousness is. In this article, I argue that Kant regards pre-synthesized intuition as conscious but indeterminate. To make this case, I contextualize Kant's position through the work of H.S. Reimarus, a predecessor of Kant who influenced his views on animals, infants, and the role of attention. I use Reimarus to clarify Kant's otherwise ambiguous commitments on the determinacy of intuition in animals and newborns, and the role attention, concepts, and judgment play in making intuited contents determinate. This contextualization helps to shed light on Kant's discussion of pre-synthesized intuition in the threefold synthesis of the A-Deduction by demonstrating that Kant's theory of mind in the deduction offers transcendental grounding for empirical accounts of infant development like Kant and Reimarus's. The upshot is a Kant at odds with many recent interpretations of his theory of mind:pre-synthesized intuition is conscious but indeterminate. "In the beginning, the entire content of our sensations and sensory representations […] are unseparated and undistinguished, almost like a single sensation; thus, the first task of the soul must have been to separate and distribute them into heaps. The result was that the inner sensations formed a class, the outer sensations of the body another, and the sensations from external objects a third, which were then perceived as a distinct kind." (Tetens, 1777, pp. 371-372) A central issue in debates about Kant and nonconceptualism concerns the nature of intuition. At a minimum, Kant is committed to a logically separable notion of intuition: "Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking" (CPR A91/B123). 1 But there is sharp disagreement among Kant scholars about the cognitive significance of intuition on its own, prior to the work of

show abstract

Kant as Both Conceptualist and Nonconceptualist

Cited by 30 publications

References 16 publications

Can there be a Finite Interpretation of the Kantian Sublime?

Can there be a Finite Interpretation of the Kantian Sublime?

Taking non‐conceptualism back to Dharmakīrti

Kant and the determinacy of intuition

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About