In §76 of the 3rd Critique, Kant claims that an intuitive understanding would represent no distinction between possible and actual things. Prior interpretations of §76 take Kant to claim that an intuitive understanding would produce things merely in virtue of thinking about them and, thus, could not think of merely possible things. In contrast, I argue that §76’s modal claims hinge on Kant’s suggestion that God represents things in their thoroughgoing determination, including in their connection to God’s actual will. I (...) conclude by using my interpretation to argue that §76’s modal claims do not entail Spinozism. (shrink)

Kant claims that an intuitive understanding—such as God would possess—could cognize things in themselves. This claim has prompted many interpreters of Kant's theoretical philosophy to propose that things in themselves correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. In contrast, I argue that Kant's theoretical philosophy does not endorse the common proposal that all things in themselves correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. Instead, Kant's theoretical philosophy maintains that things in themselves might or might not correspond (...) to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. I then consider whether Kant's moral philosophy and theory of reflecting judgment might provide alternative grounds for claiming that we should regard things in themselves as corresponding to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. I argue that Kant's moral philosophy does not provide such grounds, but his theory of reflecting judgment does. Thus, interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism should attend to the differences between Kant's theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, and theory of reflecting judgment in assessing the relationship between intuitive understanding and things in themselves. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we show that Kant’s complex concept of an “intuitive understanding”, which operates in his work as a tool for defining the peculiar character of our understanding, is critically absorbed by Hegel’s concept of “objective thought.” By means of this concept, Hegel first rejects the representational conception of thought that is implied by the Kantian concept of an intuitive understanding and, second, he proposes a way of comprehending thought that allows a new conception of the relationship between (...) the subject and reality. (shrink)

Mental representations—like many other things—seem to have parts. However, it isn’t clear how to properly understand the idea of a part of a representation. In this paper I shed new light on how representations can have a mereology. In particular, it has been recognized that there is a mereological element to Kant’s distinction between two kinds of representations: intuitions and concepts. A concept depends upon its parts, whereas an intuition is prior to its parts. The paper thus focuses on an (...) exploration of how to make sense of the parts and wholes of intuitions and concepts. (shrink)

What is the function of modal judgment? Why do we make judgments of possibility and necessity? Or are such judgments, in fact, dispensable? This paper introduces and develops an answer to these questions based on Kant’s remarks in section 76 of the Critique of Judgment. Here, Kant appears to argue the following: that a capacity to make modal judgments using modal concepts is required for a capacity for objective representation, in light of our split cognitive architecture. This split cognitive architecture (...) leaves room for a mismatch between our concepts and intuitions and, Kant argues, that is why we need modal concepts and modal judgments. In this paper, I develop this account of the function of modal judgment and to explore the extent to which it may improve upon contemporary alternatives. I focus on one particularly important challenge for the account: to explain why a distinction between the actual and the possible, rather than merely a distinction between the actual and the non-actual, is required. In order to answer this question, I supplement the account with a particular way of thinking about objectivity. (shrink)

One of Kant’s categories—a priori concepts the possession and applicability of which are necessary conditions of possible experience—is a concept of necessity. But it is unclear why the concept of necessity, as Kant defines it, should be a category thus understood. My aim is to offer a reading of Kant that fills this lacuna: the category of necessity is required to make necessity as it features in the world of experience understandable: a concept that the understanding can grasp and employ (...) in cognition of objects. Kant’s view has potential wider significance for accounts of the function of necessity judgments. (shrink)

Kant describes intellectual intuition as a kind of non-sensible intuition that creates its objects and provides knowledge of them as noumena. Although he precludes intellectual intuition from the human mind, Reinhold attributes it to the human mind. Pioneering research has already shown that Reinhold deviates from Kant in this way to explain the possibility of a priori self-cognition. It has also already shown that Fichte follows Reinhold by deviating from Kant in the same way. Yet, other aspects of Reinhold’s doctrine (...) of intellectual intuition remain largely overlooked. Among the few Reinhold scholars who study it, the extant view is that intellectual intuition does not yield cognition of an absolute knower, and that only Fichte makes this assertion. However, this view ignores Reinhold’s claim that I must attribute all my representations to an absolute knower to explain the unity of experience. In this paper, I argue that we must take this claim seriously, and I show that, for Reinhold, my cognition of myself as an absolute knower in intellectual intuition enables me to attribute all my representations to myself as such a knower, and he does so prior to Fichte. (shrink)

Kant's theory of the intuitive intellect has a broad and substantial role in the development and exposition of his critical philosophy. An emphasis on this theory's reception and appropriation on the part of the German idealists has tended to divert attention from Kant's own treatment of the topic. In this essay, I seek an adequate overview of the theory Kant advances in support of his critical enterprise. I examine the nature of the intuitive intellect's object; its epistemic relation to its (...) object; its mode of comprehension; the relationship between these cognitive elements; and I ask which minds Kant regards as intuitive intellects. (shrink)

Kant states in §76 of the third Critique that the divine intuitive intellect would not represent modal distinctions. Kohl and Stang claim that this statement entails that noumena lack modal properties, which, in turn, conflicts with Kant’s attribution of contingency to human noumenal wills. They both propose resolutions to this conflict based on conjectures regarding how God might non-modally represent what our discursive intellects represent as modally determined. I argue that these proposals fail; the viable resolution consists in recognizing that (...) we modalize human noumenal wills as a merely regulative-practical principle in our judgements of imputation. (shrink)

I begin by considering a question that has driven much scholarship on transcendental idealism: are appearances numerically identical to the things in themselves that appear, or numerically distinct? I point out that much of the debate on this question has assumed that this is equivalent to the question of whether they are the same objects, but go on to provide textual, historical, and philosophical evidence that “object” (Gegenstand) and “thing” (Ding) have different meanings for Kant. A thing is a locus (...) of intensively gradable causal force, reality. I argue that appearances and things in themselves are not identical as objects, because the very concept of object-identity is tied, for Kant, to the concept of an intellect that would cognize the numerical identity of the objects in question. Because no intellect can be both discursive and intellectual, no intellect could cognize the numerical identity of objects across the phenomenal/noumenal divide, and thus the claim that they are identical has no content. However, the very same things, the same reality, can be given to our sensible intellects, and to divine intuitive intellect, as two non-overlapping domains of objects. Identity readers are thus shown to be right about the same thing relation, while non-identity readers are vindicated on the numerical identity of objects. (shrink)

Overview of the (non)conceptualism debate in Kant studies.