Anna Tomaszewska

The first part of the article discusses one of the more important issues in the contemporary philosophy of perception and mind, i.e. the problem of the relation between experience and concepts, and that against the background of the conceptualism vs. nonconceptualism debate. On the conceptualist account of empirical cognition, perceptual contents are (throughout) conceptual in the sense that concepts constitute (through and through) the contents of perceptual experience. It is a necessary condition of the ascription of an experience and an empirical belief to a subject that he or she possessed concepts figuring in the characteristic of his or her experience. The relation between experience and belief is described as rational (or logical) rather than causal. I suggest a critical approach towards the conceptualist view in that I spell out some of its inconsistencies. Further, I focus on some selected kinds of nonconceptualism supported by such theorists as Ch. Peacocke, F. Dretske and J. L. Bermúdez.In the second part of my paper, I criticize McDowell’s conceptualist reading of Kant, on which the author of the Critique of Pure Reason is considered as representing the originally conceptualist position. Some of the theses Kant argues for in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and earlier on in his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation allow us to conclude that, on a certain interpretation of the forms of empirical cognition (space and time), perception, on Kant’s theory, could be regarded as an active but not a concept-involving cognitive process.

The article makes an attempt at comparing two perspectives from which philosophical cognition starts – a perspective which can be encountered in Spinoza’s Ethics and a perspective which can be encountered in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the first case, a finite subject of the philosophical cognition embarks on the cognition of the substance, that is, reality in its comprehensiveness; in the second case, a finite subject of philosophical cognition reflects upon the totality of the field of possible experience, uncovering the conditions of its possibility. Both kinds of cognition consist in a pursuit to comprehend what is necessary and strictly universal. I claim that as much as the source of the cognition at stake is, on Spinoza’s account, provided by the intuitive grasp of the ontological identity of the subject and the whole of the reality, on Kant account, indicating the source or the ground of the transcendental cognition proves more difficult, even though it might be granted that as in Spinoza’s cognition of the substance, also in the cognition which furnishes the judgments of the Critique of Pure Reason, intuition plays the decisive role.

In recent publications on the Enlightenment, Baruch Spinoza is often associated with the radical “fringe,” advocating against Christianity and giving rise to the incipient process of secularization. In this paper, it is argued that we should look for Spinoza’s influence on the Enlightenment in his ideas inspiring heterodox theologians: radical reformers aiming to “rationalize” revelation but not to dismiss it altogether. Several cases of such thinkers are adduced and shortly discussed: Jarig Jelles, Johan Christian Edelmann, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt and Immanuel Kant. Finally, three ways of conceptualizing the relation between Enlightenment and religion are sketched to address the question whether the sources of secularization can indeed be traced back to the Enlightenment.

This introduction is divided into two parts. First, drawing on Paul Guyer’s suggestion that we should turn to Kant to reinvestigate the foundations of religious liberty, I outline Kant’s views on the relations between the ethical and the political community, as presented in Part Three of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, focusing in particular on his arguments for separation between religion and the state. Examining critically the idea to employ Kant in contemporary debates, I claim that Kant’s account of pure moral faith and the church as its ‘vehicle’ may pose difficulties for any argument for religious liberty that appeals to his thought. For Kant is better equipped to offer resources to overcome rather than to accommodate the fact of so-called “moral pluralism,” i.e. the condition in which the principle of religious liberty can find its application. In the second part, I summarise the arguments of the authors who contribute to this volume: D. Jakušić, W. Kozyra, S. Lo Re, G.E. Michalson Jr., and S.R. Palmquist.