Anna Tomaszewska

The paper focuses on a discussion about McDowell’s "conceptualist" interpretation of Kant’s theory of experience, as one in which all representational content is identified with conceptual content. Both in Mind and WorldM and in his Woodbridge Lectures, McDowell furthers a reading on which the "picture of visual experiences as conceptual shapings of visual consciousness is already deeply Kantian", supporting it with Kant’s famous claim from the A51/ B75 passage of the Critique of Pure Reason, which can be called a Cooperation Thesis. However, much indicates that McDowell’s reading is, if not altogether false, then at least one-sided. In the "Transcendental Aesthetic", as well as in some of the pre-Critical writings , Kant presented a range of arguments for a subjective, non-discursive character of space and time, i.e. the forms of sensible intuition and pure intuitions themselves, underlying all conceptual cognition, and providing a non-conceptual basis for a special kind of synthetic a priori cognition . This allows us to conclude that he would rather take the side of the contemporary “nonconceptualists”, and could be regarded as their predecessor, to use R. Hanna’s formulation. On this reading of the Kantian theory of empirical cognition, intentionality is independent of and prior to any application of concepts to the objects of experience

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.