Abstract

Is Kant a conceptualist or a nonconceptualist? Very roughly, this amounts to the following question: Do intuitions depend on concepts in order to represent objects? Much recent Kant scholarship is devoted to answering this question, which is of interest not only for its connection to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and perception, but also because the answer one provides has important implications for how one understands crucial features of Kant’s account of cognition. In this extended review essay, I examine how the authors in this volume, most of whom adopt some version of nonconceptualism, approach the following three questions: (1) Is the unity of the pure intuition of space as an all-encompassing whole independent of the understanding, and if so, what follows with respect to the unity of empirical intuitions? (2) When Kant says that all objects of the senses stand under the categories, does this mean that the categories play a role in generating intuitions, or is there a way of understanding this claim that is compatible with nonconceptualism (according to which intuitions do not depend on concepts in order to be intuitions)? And finally, (3) Are intuitions representational or relational states and what implications does this have for how we understand the role of intuitions in establishing real possibility?