Cassirer and Kant on the Unity of Space and the Role of Imagination
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Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira
Abstract
The focus of this paper is Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian reading of Kant’s conception of unity of space. Cassirer’s neo-Kantian reading is largely in conformity with the mainstream of intellectualist Kant-scholars, which is unsurprising, given his own intellectualist view of space and perception and his rejection of the existence of a ‘merely sensory consciousness’ as a ‘formless mass of impression’. I argue against Cassirer’s reading by relying on a Kantian distinction first recognized by Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian from the Southwest school, between Kenntnis (roughly knowledge by acquaintance) and Erkenntnis (roughly propositional knowledge). Correspondingly, I claim that concepts and categories are conditions for Erkenntnis of objects as such, namely for thinking of and apprehending the pre-existing unity as an object, rather than for the ‘constitution’ of this very unity.
Bibliography
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- On Method: The Fact of Science and the Distinction between Natural Science and the Humanities
- Durkheim’s French Neo-Kantian Social Thought: Epistemology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Morality in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
- Eduard von Hartmann, die Postulatenlehre und die Genese des Neukantianismus im Kontext spiritistischer Debatten um 1900
- The Problem of Schematism in Kant and its Transformation in Southwest Neo-Kantianism
- Cassirer and Kant on the Unity of Space and the Role of Imagination
- Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis and Cassirer’s Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff
- List of Contributors
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2021, 2022 and 2023
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- On Method: The Fact of Science and the Distinction between Natural Science and the Humanities
- Durkheim’s French Neo-Kantian Social Thought: Epistemology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Morality in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
- Eduard von Hartmann, die Postulatenlehre und die Genese des Neukantianismus im Kontext spiritistischer Debatten um 1900
- The Problem of Schematism in Kant and its Transformation in Southwest Neo-Kantianism
- Cassirer and Kant on the Unity of Space and the Role of Imagination
- Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis and Cassirer’s Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff
- List of Contributors
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2021, 2022 and 2023