Kant on intentionality

"This paper addresses a number of closely related questions concerning Kant’s model of intentionality, and his conceptions of unity and of magnitude [Grösse]. These questions are important because they shed light on three issues which are central to the Critical system, and which connect directly to the recent analytic literature on perception: the issues are conceptualism, the status of the imagination, and perceptual atomism. In Section 1, I provide a sketch of the exegetical and philosophical problems raised by Kant’s views on these issues. I then develop, in Section 2, a detailed analysis of Kant’s theory of perception as elaborated in both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment; I show how this analysis provides a preliminary framework for resolving the difficulties raised in Section 1. In Section 3, I extend my analysis of Kant’s position by considering a specific test case: the Axioms of Intuition. I contend that one way to make sense of Kant’s argument is by juxtaposing it with Russell’s response to Bradley’s regress; I focus in particular on the concept of ‘unity’. Finally, I offer, in Section 4, a philosophical assessment of the position attributed to Kant in Sections 2 and 3. I argue that, while Kant’s account has significant strengths, a number of key areas remain underdeveloped; I suggest that the phenomenological tradition may be read as attempting to fill precisely those gaps."

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato, 2006

Kairós, 2024

Restoring the epistemological foundation of natural science through the identification of the synthetic unity of modal and counterfactual representations-those that presume the necessary character of the restricting possibilities of the empirical world-was Kant's principal goal in opposing Hume. But in order to do so, he had to significantly alter the empiricist theory of human cognitive capacity such that the idea of mind was no longer captured by a narrow definition of psychologism. Not only did he develop new explanations for synthetic or contentistic inferences (which were later technically developed by nonclassical intuitionistic logical theories), but he also advanced the philosophy of mind toward an idealized representation of mental structures by extending our psychological knowledge to complex theories about the correlation between a priori concepts and intuitions. We will outline Kant's trajectory in this regard in the Critique of Pure Reason, including his absorption by Husserl's phenomenology in the nineteenth century, and offer conclusions regarding how these theories anticipated semantic solutions on the content of intentionality and mental content.

Co-edited with Anil Gomes, Oxford University Press, 2017

The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? What kinds of empirical models can be given of these operations? In what sense, and in what ways, are intuitions object-dependent? How should we understand the nature of the imagination? What is inner sense, and what does it mean to say that time is the form of inner sense? Can we cognize ourselves through inner sense? How do we self-ascribe our beliefs and what role does self-consciousness play in our judgments? Is the will involved in judging? What kind of knowledge can we have of the self ? And what kind of knowledge of the self does Kant proscribe? These essays showcase the depth of Kant’s writings in the philosophy of mind, and the centrality of those writings to his wider philosophical project. Moreover, they show the continued relevance of Kant’s writings to contemporary debates about the nature of mind and self. Contents: 0. Introduction Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson 1. Kant, The Philosophy Of Mind, And Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy Anil Gomes 2. Synthesis And Binding Lucy Allais 3. Understanding Non-Conceptual Representation Of Objects: Empirical Models Of Sensibility’s Operation Katherine Dunlop 4. Are Kantian Intuitions Object-Dependent? Stefanie Grüne 5. Intuition And Presence Colin McLear 6. Imagination And Inner Intuition Andrew Stephenson 7. Inner Sense And Time Ralf M. Bader 8. Can’t Kant Cognize Himself? Or, A Problem For (Almost) Every Interpretation Of The Refutation Of Idealism Andrew Chignell 9. A Kantian Critique Of Transparency Patricia Kitcher 10. Judging For Reasons: On Kant And The Modalities Of Judgment Jessica Leech 11. Kant On Judging And The Will Jill Vance Buroker 12. Self and Selves Ralph C. S. Walker 13. Subjects Of Kant’s First Paralogism Tobias Rosefeldt 14. The Lessons Of Kant’s Paralogisms Paul Snowdon

1997

2018

This article addresses three questions concerning Kant's views on non-rational animals: do they intuit spatio-temporal particulars, do they perceive objects, and do they have intentional states? My aim is to explore the relationship between these questions and to clarify certain pervasive ambiguities in how they have been understood. I first disambiguate various non-equivalent notions of objecthood and intentionality: I then look closely at several models of objectivity present in Kant's work, and at recent discussions of representational and relational theories of intentionality. I argue ultimately that, given the relevant disambiguations, the answers to all three questions will likely be positive. These results both support what has become known as the nonconceptualist reading of Kant, and make clearer the price the conceptualist must pay to sustain her position.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2001

It is generally assumed that, during his early pre-critical phase, Kant accepted a Leibnizian account of freedom according to which we are free to do otherwise than we do even though our actions are determined. This assumption is false. Far from endorsing such an account, Kant explicitly argues in the New Elucidation of the First Principle of Metaphysical Cognition (1755) that there is no relevant sense in which we can do otherwise than we do. Nevertheless, he is equally convinced that we are free and responsible for our actions. And so he concludes that we can be responsible for what we do even if we could not have done otherwise. Little attention, however, has been paid to this argument. This is unfortunate, since a better understanding of this stage in Kant’s theory of freedom would surely help us in understanding the later critical developments. This paper seeks to remedy this deficiency.

Philosophia, 2017

The issue of the nature of cognitive experience has been a subject of lively debate in recent works on epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. During this debate, the relevance of Kant to contemporary theories of cognition has been rediscovered. However, participants in this debate disagree whether Kant was a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist, with regard to the character of intuitions. The central point of controversy concerns whether or not Kant’s sensible intuitions involve understanding and have a conceptual content. In this paper, I show that, despite their disagreements, both sides share a number of common presuppositions, which have determined a biased framework for the reading of Kant. My principal aim in this article is to reconcile the case for conceptualism with those interpretations which argue that intentionality and conceptuality can be separated. To achieve it, I present my own reconstruction of Kant’s theory of cognition, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction, and offer a new interpretation of Kantian conceptualism.

Reflection in the anatomy of the Kantian mind, 2022

The present dissertation shows the centrality of Kant’s notion of ‘reflection’ to the project of the Critique of pure reason. I argue that Kant was unquestionably in possession of a unified conception of reflection that is operative at several central junctures in the Critique. On the account I develop, Kant takes reflection to be a fundamental act of the intellect, which secures the unity of consciousness by being aware of the compatibility between any given set of representations and the unity of consciousness in representing them. Thus, reflection is a necessary part of any conceptualizing act by securing the status of the concept as a representation of the unity of mind in representing a given representational manifold. This notion of reflection, I show, is applicable not only across textual and topical occurrences of the term but also across what we might term reflective types. Thus, while some readers might expect there to be an essential difference between Kant’s conception of what has come to be termed ‘logical reflection’ and ‘transcendental reflection’ it is the upshot of my analysis that these are not two wholly separate types of reflection. Rather, both aim to secure the unity of consciousness in essentially the same way, only transcendental reflection includes an awareness of the distinction between representational types. The four chapters of the dissertation show that this conception of reflection connects Kant’s uses of the term in the context of self-consciousness, the acquisition of the categories, judgment-formation and evaluation and discussions of method. In chapter 1, I argue that Kant is committed to a view of apperception as essentially reflective but show that the essential reflectiveness of apperception neither turns apperception into a higher-order self-consciousness nor makes it identical to reflection. Rather, I argue, we should understand the relationship between apperception and reflection in terms of a bi-conditional: apperception if and only if reflection. Chapter 2 develops and expands on the claim in Chapter 1 that reflection provides apperception with its necessary form of though by developing an account of the role of reflection in what Kant calls the original acquisition of the categories. Reflection is requisite for the acquisition of the categories as the necessary form of thought expressed in the “I think” but cannot for that reason be taken as a pre-condition of apperception. Chapter 3 continues this trajectory by arguing that reflection is a constitutive part of our cognition of objects by being a constitutive part of the act of judgments. Thus, I argue that when Kant states that “all judgments […] require a reflection” (A 261/B 317), there are good reasons for thinking that he takes that to be more than a mere normative requirement. Rather, both logical and transcendental reflection are necessary elements in our coming to form judgements. In this way, Chapter 3 rounds off an argument developed throughout all three chapters that reflection in Kant’s specifically technical sense plays a central role at all levels of first order cognition. In the fourth and final chapter, I turn to the question of reflection in the context of the method of the Critique and argue that far from suffering from what some commentators see as a failure of self-reflection, Kant adopts an essentially reflective methodology. In particular, I show that reflection plays a crucial role in this method by being essential to the isolation and distinction of our cognitive faculties. The chapter thus concludes the reflective movement of the dissertation – from the reflective subject to the objects and back - by showing that reflection is not just essential for having first-order thoughts and cognitions but equally essential if we want to give a stable account of thinking and cognizing in general.