Anna Tomaszewska

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.

John McDowell claims that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs. Perceptual reasons, according to the author of Mind and World, can be identified with passively “taken in” facts. Concepts figure in the acts of acquiring perceptual reasons, even though the acts themselves do not consist in judgments. Thus, on my reading, McDowell’s account of reasons-acquisition can be likened to Descartes’ account of the acquisition of ideas, rather than to Kant’s theory of judgment as an act by means of which one’s cognition comes to be endowed with objective validity. However, unlike Descartes, McDowell does not acknowledge the skeptical challenge which his conception of reasons-acquisition might face. He contends that perception is factive without arguing for the background assumption on which it rests. Hence, as I suggest in my article, the McDowellian claim that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs is not sufficiently warranted.