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)

In recent work, Scott Soames (2010, 2013, 2015, 2019) and Peter Hanks (2011, 2013, 2015) have developed a theory of propositions on which these are constituted by complexes of intellectual acts. In this article, I adapt this type of theory to provide an account of perceptual content. After introducing terminology in section 1, I detail the approach proffered by Soames and Hanks in section 2, focusing on Hanks’s version. In section 3, I introduce a problem that these theories face, namely, (...) how to account for the unity among the relevant intellectual acts. Section 4 provides an answer to this problem of unity, while section 5 explicates the relation to Soames and Hanks. In section 6, I extend the model to a theory of the unity of experiential consciousness. Finally, in section 7, I apply the preceding considerations to debates about the nature of perceptual representation. The upshot will be that experiential unity is not simply a phenomenal feature of consciousness, but central to an account of the role perceptual representation plays in perceptual cognition. (shrink)

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

Extended critical discussion of Lucy Allais, *Manifest Reality*.

This dissertation’s contribution consists in providing a novel interpretation of the role time plays in Kant’s transcendental idealism. A significant part of Kant scholarship on the Critiques tends to assume that time, as understood in transcendental philosophy, is solely a formal property of intuition. This assumption has led several commentators to overlook a fundamental feature of transcendental idealism, namely, that in being the most basic form of intuition time is, also, a provider of content in and for experience. In looking (...) attentively at such feature this dissertation shows that time is the activity of the self that grounds the possibility of objectivity and explores the philosophical implications of such an interpretation. In the first Chapter I conduct a comprehensive survey of relevant literature and show that it is impossible to separate general metaphysics from transcendental logic in the context of Kant’s transcendental philosophy without making serious philosophical sacrifices. I then argue, in the second Chapter, that time is not merely a formal property of intuition but is, rather, the fundamental form of intuition and that, even if space is in no way reducible to, or derivable from it, time has nonetheless primacy over space on both logical and ontological grounds. From this I argue that by time, or self-affection, Kant understands the activity of subjectivity that brings about the possibility of relating to objects through the power of imagination. In the third Chapter, I show that such relation is not left wholly undetermined and that, instead, it occurs in accordance with the layout presented by Kant in the Table of Judgments, the Table of Pure Concepts of the Understanding, the Schemata and, importantly, in the System of Principles of the Understanding. I show that only an interpretation that acknowledges the systematicity found in the Analytic section of the Critique of Pure Reason can justify the distinction drawn by Kant between the mathematical and the dynamical and conclude, from that, that time does indeed provide a specific content in and for experience to be found in the Schematism doctrine. Finally, in the fourth Chapter I broaden the philosophical scope and inquire as to whether Kant has the theoretical means to articulate something like an uncategorized schema or time-determination. I conclude that, although in the Critical period Kant can do so only problematically, in the post-Critical period there are means to do so categorically: system, as such, is a time-determination for which the understanding lacks a pure concept. (shrink)

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’ consists in and what the starting point of the ‘synthesis in apprehension’ might be. (shrink)