Kant and the Understanding’s Role in Imaginative Synthesis
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Patrick E. Arens
Abstract
The aim of this article is to contribute to the ongoing debate about whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist, by criticizing Hannah Ginsborg’s conceptualist interpretation found in her “Was Kant a nonconceptualist?” (2008). Ginsborg’s conceptualist interpretation places important focus on imaginative synthesis. According to Ginsborg, our being conscious of imaginative synthesis is an essential element of such processes and it is our consciousness that confers intentionality to synthesized representations. In this article, I undermine Ginsborg’s account by offering several passages that challenge its central tenets. Then, I develop and argue for an interpretation of imaginative synthesis that respects the passages used against Ginsborg. In short, I think the original text supports an account of synthesis such that the manifold of intuitions produced by our faculty of sensibility is unconsciously synthetically unified by the imagination. It is important to note that while the interpretation I offer here does not decisively support a conceptualist or non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant, it is nevertheless favorable to both the content and state non-conceptualist readings and unfavorable to the Ginsborgian conceptualist reading; this is because my interpretation shows that the mere fact of imaginative synthesis does not itself entail conceptualism, as Ginsborg maintains.
© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Contents
- Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves
- Kant and the Understanding’s Role in Imaginative Synthesis
- Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s first Critique
- Kant on the Soul’s Intensity
- The Aeneas Argument: Personality and Immortality in Kant’s Third Paralogism
- Kant’s Epistemological Reorientation of Ontology
- Kant’s conception of self as subject and its embodiment
- Time and Metaphysics: Kant and McTaggart on the Reality of Time
- List of Contributors
- Note to the STUDI KANTIANI, XXII, 2009
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Contents
- Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves
- Kant and the Understanding’s Role in Imaginative Synthesis
- Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s first Critique
- Kant on the Soul’s Intensity
- The Aeneas Argument: Personality and Immortality in Kant’s Third Paralogism
- Kant’s Epistemological Reorientation of Ontology
- Kant’s conception of self as subject and its embodiment
- Time and Metaphysics: Kant and McTaggart on the Reality of Time
- List of Contributors
- Note to the STUDI KANTIANI, XXII, 2009
