In this essay, I specify types of representational content that can be attributed to Kant’s account of representation. The more specific aim is to examine which of these types of content can be regarded as possible without the application of concepts. In order to answer the question, I proceed as follows. First, I show how intuition (in Kant’s sense) can be seen as providing indexical content independently of empirical concepts. Second, I show in what sense the generation of spatial content (...) can be regarded as non-categorial. A key distinction is that a perceptual examination of an object can be understood as thoroughly sensible and particular, whereas a conceptual determination always grasps the object via its generalisable features. Third, I propose that the faculties of sensibility and understanding are not only separable in principle, but that their contributions remain in a certain sense separate in actual cognition as well. This is to say that a conceptual determination of an object does not entail that the object ceases to be non-conceptually available to the perceiver, which further suggests the autonomy of sensibility and its perceptual content. Finally, I raise difficulties in attributing non-conceptual representational content to Kant’s judgment-centered stance on representation and experience, only to emphasise how these difficulties easily lead to a misappreciation of Kant’s fundamental distinction between sensibility and understanding and their unique cognitive contributions. (shrink)

Kant claims repeatedly that experience involves sensations being ‘ordered and placed’ in space. This paper considers what this surprising claim could possibly mean. After presenting the relevant textual evidence and rejecting two candidate interpretations of it, I defend a qualia or ‘mental paint’ interpretation, according to which experience involves a direct, conscious ‘acquaintance’ with sensations arrayed in a ‘phenomenal space.’ This interpretation allows us to take literally many of Kant's claims about sensation: that it is the matter of both intuition (...) and appearance, that we are conscious of sensation in perception, and that sensible qualities like color are sensations. (shrink)