Abstract

Gordon Nagel’s Kant differs sharply form Berkeley. More importantly, he offers a powerful and systematic account of perception and understanding which can be argued to be a serious contender in contemporary discussions of epistemology and cognitive psychology. Readers tempted to think that Kant may be dismissed because of his commitments to the myths of the given and the analytic/empirical distinction are forced to think again. Here we have a Kant for whom the given is analyzable and who is a species of holist—and yet who also defends a detailed account of a priori structures of experiences. Nagel offers us all this and more including illuminating discussions of Kant’s departures from the Modern tradition, a suggestive discussion of analogies between twentieth-century accounts of language and Kant’s account of cognitive synthesis, and a distinction between interpretation and understanding that helps demystify the phenomena/noumena distinction.