Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis and Cassirer’s Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff

This paper compares Cohen’s Logic of Pure Knowledge and Cassirer’s Substance and Function in order to evaluate how in these works Cohen and Cassirer go beyond the limits established by Kantian philosophy. In his Logic, Cohen seeks to ground in pure thought all the elements which Kant distinguishes in empirical intuition: its matter (sensation) as well as its form (time and space). In this way, Cohen tries to provide an account of knowledge without appealing to any receptivity. In accordance with Cohen’s project of reformulating the Kantian theory of sensibility, Cassirer undertakes in Substance and Function the task of developing an alternative doctrine of pure and empirical manifolds. But whereas Cohen analyzes the laws of pure thought, Cassirer aims to highlight the functional character of concepts in the development of modern mathematics and physics. I will discuss these two different approaches to the problems raised by Kantian philosophy and I will argue that Cassirer went further than Cohen in the project of critical idealism.

Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, Non-Conceptualism, and the Fitness-for-Purpose Objection

The subject of this article is a powerful objection to the non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. Part of the purpose of the deduction is to refute the sort of scepticism according to which there are no objects of empirical intuition that instantiate the categories. But if the non-conceptualist interpretation is correct, it does not follow from what Kant is arguing in the transcendental deduction that this sort of scepticism is false. This article explains and assesses a number of possible responses to this objection.

Intuition and Presence

This chapter explicates the notion of ‘presence’ (Gegenwart) as it pertains to intuition. Specifically, it examines two central problems for the position that an empirical intuition is an immediate relation to an existing particular in one’s environment. The first stems from Kant’s description of the faculty of imagination, while the second stems from Kant’s discussion of hallucination. This chapter argues that Kant’s writings indicate at least one possible means of reconciling these two problems with a conception of ‘presence’ such that perceptual and hallucinatory states might be understood as different kinds of intuition. This may not be sufficient to secure the relationalist’s claim that intuition is an immediate relation to an existing particular in one’s environment, but it does show that opposition to this claim will require further argument.

ENSAIO SOBRE A UNIDADE SINTÉTICA MERAMENTE SENSÍVEL

I present the essay of my critique to the interpretation that the synthetic unity of intuition in Kant can only result from the effective participation of intellectual faculties. For this, I maintain that the objects of intuition are constructed not only by means of the understanding (lato sensu), but also by the simple imagination, by means of a synthetic unit of the multiple of the intuition given to the sense, without it being necessary the direction or conduction of discursive units, but respecting only autochthonous rules. Thus these objects of intuition contain a unity originated only from the sensibility (merely sensible synthetic unit), for they are produced only by the imagination, under the only condition of obtaining the disconnected manifold of sensible representations from the collaboration of the senses. The faculty of imagination is apt to produce these conceptually indeterminate objects of the empirical intuition called “appearances” [Erscheinungen], because it is a spontaneous sensible capacity with duplicity of character, impulses and aptitudes (Calabria: 2012, 115-167, 2015 and 2016). In addition to showing that appearances, while blind intuitions containing a subjective unity, nevertheless provide an objective reference to empirical intuitions (as mind modifications), I explain in what sense Kant considers appearances to be transformed into objects of experience called «phenomena» [Phaenomena], when they receive the intellectual unit from the application of conceptual representations.

Kant's Argument for the Principle of Intensive Magnitudes

In the firstCritique,Kant attempts to prove what we can call the ‘principle of intensive magnitudes’, according to which every possible object of experience will possess a determinate ‘degree’ of reality. Curiously, Kant argues for this principle by inferring from a psychological premise about internal sensations (they have intensive magnitudes) to a metaphysical thesis about external objects (they also have intensive magnitudes). Most commentators dismiss the argument as a failure. In this article I give a reconstruction of Kant's argument that attempts to rehabilitate the argument back into his broader transcendental theory of experience. I argue that we can make sense of the argument's central inference by appeal to Kant's theory of empirical intuition and by an analysis of the way in which Kant thinks sensory matter constitutes our most basic representations of objects.