Abstract
The central aim of this chapter is to demonstrate an essential connection between Kant’s nonconceptualism and his transcendental idealism by tracing this line of thinking in Kant’s work directly back to his pre-Critical essay of 1768, Concerning the Ground of the Ultimate Differentiation of Directions in Space aka “Directions in Space”. What I shall argue is that Kant’s nonconceptualism about the human mind goes all the way down into his metaphysics; that the apparent world fundamentally conforms to human sensibility even if it does not fundamentally conform to the human understanding; and that the basic source of all this is Kant’s (pre-Critical but later also Critical) theory of space and how we represent it.
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Notes
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- 3.
See e.g. Evans (1982). In the contemporary debate about conceptualism vs nonconceptualism, it is now standard to draw a distinction between state (or possession-theoretic) nonconceptualism and content nonconceptualism. State nonconceptualism says that there are mental states such that the subject of those states fails to possess concepts for the specification of those states. Content nonconceptualism, by contrast, says that some mental states have content that is of a different kind from that of conceptual content. In turn, essentialist content nonconceptualism says that the content of such states is of a categorically or essentially different kind from that of conceptual content. For a general survey of nonconceptualism, see Bermúdez and Cahen (2015). For the distinction between state and content nonconceptualism, see Heck (2009). And for the distinction between non-essentialist and essentialist content nonconceptualism, see Hanna (2008, 2011, 2015, Chap. 2).
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The inherent connections between intellectualism and conceptualism, on the one hand, and between non-intellectualism and nonconceptualism, on the other, are developed in detail in Hanna (2015), esp. Chaps. 2–3, and Hanna (MS), Chap. 5.
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See e.g. McLear (2014b).
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I have substituted “representation” (Vorstellung) here and further below for Kant’s “concept” (Begriff). My rationale is this. In Hanna (2006), Chap. 5, while working out a rationally charitable step-by-step argument-reconstruction of the Transcendental Aesthetic (TAe), I argued for Kant’s shifting from a general, loose sense of “concept” in the pre-Critical and proto-Critical writings, where it basically means the same as “representation”, to a narrower, technical sense of “concept”, which means an essentially general, descriptive or “attributive” representation, in TAe and the rest of the First Critique and other Critical and post-Critical writings (including the Jäsche Logic), where it sharply contrasts with his use of “intuition”, which means an essentially singular or “directly referential” representation. This sharp contrast between the meanings of “concept” and “intuition” begins to emerge in the “Inaugural Dissertation”, but unfortunately they are not made fully terminologically explicit there. Moreover, and to make things even worse for interpreters, in TAe Kant still does not fully terminologically update the material he took from the “Inaugural Dissertation”, and occasionally uses “concept” of space (or time) when he really means “representation of space (or time)” or “pure intuition of space (or time)”. This causes not only significant interpretive confusion, it also gives the false appearance of occasionally making Kant seem blatantly self-contradictory—e.g. when he says explicitly that the “concept” of space (or time) is not a concept but instead a pure intuition, etc. Assuming all this is true, and again applying rational charity in philosophical interpretation, we can avoid equal confusion in the retrospective, proto-Critical direction only by substituting “representation” for “concept” in Directions in Space, when Kant would, with philosophical hindsight, clearly intend to be talking either neutrally about representations that are either “concepts” or “intuitions” in the later, narrower, technical senses of those terms, or else specifically about “intuitions” in the later, narrower, technical sense.
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See e.g. McLear (2011).
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For more fully spelled out versions of this argument, see Hanna (2008, 2011).
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There are also several more exciting but also less obvious examples, all of which have to do with the real possibility of human freedom. See Hanna (2011, 2016).
- 14.
See also Schulting (2015b).
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Hanna, R. (2016). Directions in Space, Nonconceptual Form and the Foundations of Transcendental Idealism. In: Schulting, D. (eds) Kantian Nonconceptualism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53517-7_5
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