Abstract
As one of the main proponents of Kantian nonconceptualism, Lucy Allais provides a helpful overview of the current debate on nonconceptualism in Kant scholarship by drawing on those papers that represent what appear to be central argumentative possibilities. She also responds to certain objections from conceptualists, and in specific respects makes concessions to the conceptualist, whilst holding on to her original claim that Kant is committed to a kind of nonconceptualism and that a nonconceptualist reading of intuition must be our starting point in approaching central arguments such as in the Transcendental Deduction. She emphasises that her modestly nonconceptualist interpretation is entirely compatible with thinking that all intuitions are conceptualised, that conceptualisation radically transforms what is given in intuition and for what is given in intuition to play a role in cognition, intuitions must be conceptualised.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
For example, Griffith (2012) explicitly assimilates intuition to perception.
- 4.
See McLear (2014b:771).
- 5.
- 6.
See Allais (2015) and Allais (forthcoming a).
- 7.
See McLear (2016)) and Stephenson (2015b).
- 8.
- 9.
See Golob (2014).
- 10.
- 11.
See also McLear (2014b).
- 12.
See Schulting (2015b:569) for a similar account of a moderate nonconceptualism.
- 13.
See Hanna (2005), and Hanna, Chap. 5, this volume.
- 14.
They quote Falkenstein as saying that this footnote is “so obscure that it can be made to serve the needs of any interpretation whatsoever” (Onof and Schulting 2015:4).
- 15.
See Allais (2009:392ff.) and Connolly (2014:319). Bauer (2012:223) argues that Kant makes it clear both that the blindness of intuition is total and that the blindness is the emptiness of cognitive content. He does not, however, provide strong evidence for this. He points out that Kant says that the understanding is necessary for objects to have relation to an object, and therefore for cognition to have the possibility of being true (A62–3/B87), and that the synthetic unity of apperception is necessary for anything “to become an object for me” (B138). These are important passages that the nonconceptualist must respond to (I discuss them in detail in Allais 2015 and Allais, forthcoming a), but whether Kant’s notion of “relation to an object” and of something being possible as an object of cognition are the same as having any representational content at all is certainly not apparent simply from the texts quoted.
- 16.
There is even less reason to take it to mean something specific and technical, like intentional content, as Williams (2012:60) does, given that Kant says nothing to explain that this is how he is using the word.
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This is appealed to by Bauer (2012:217).
- 18.
Ibid.
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This is appealed to by Bowman (2011:422).
- 20.
Bauer (2012:223) takes this passage as decisive.
- 21.
McDowell’s reading is discussed in detail by Williams (2012).
- 22.
- 23.
See Allais (2015), Chap. 7, Allais (forthcoming a), and McLear ((2016). See also McLear, Chap. 8 in this volume.
- 24.
This chapter is focused on the question of Kant’s conceptualism. A further crucial question with respect to intuition, which I do not discuss here, is whether or not intuitions involve the presence of the objects they represent. Stephenson (2015b) argues against the idea that they do, and the options with respect to this question are helpfully summarised by Gomes and Stephenson in Chap. 3 in this volume. I argue that intuitions involve the presence of the objects they represent in Allais (2010, 2015).
- 25.
See Pendlebury (1995).
- 26.
See, for example, Ginsborg (2008).
- 27.
See McLear (2015).
- 28.
I also argue this in Allais (2015) Chap. 7, and Allais (forthcoming a, b).
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
Allais (2009).
- 33.
See Schulting (2015b) for discussion.
- 34.
See Schulting (2015b:575).
- 35.
Allais (2015) and Allais (forthcoming a).
- 36.
Thus we can read the claim that the same function that unifies concepts in a judgement also unifies intuition (A79/B104–5) not as a claim about what produces unified intuition but as about a function that (conceptually) unifies intuitions that already exist (so already have intuitional unity).
- 37.
Griffith claims that “if he intends to show that ‘everything that may ever come before the senses’ stands under the categories, then even sense perception without judgment stands under the categories” (2012:207). We have already seen that there is an important distinction between a nonconceptualism which denies that the objects of our perception are brought under the categories, and one which denies that they need be brought under the categories in order to be given to us in intuition.
- 38.
See also Land (2015a:33).
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Allais, L. (2016). Conceptualism and Nonconceptualism in Kant: A Survey of the Recent Debate. In: Schulting, D. (eds) Kantian Nonconceptualism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53517-7_1
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