Anna Tomaszewska

In Mind and World, John McDowell appeals to Kant’s dictum that thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind as encapsulating the idea of conceptualism about the content of perceptual experience. I argue that the appeal is inadequate, and this for a variety of reasons, one of them being that if Kant endorsed conceptualism along the lines of McDowell, he would be committed to returning to positions which he explicitly criticized, i.e. those of rationalist metaphysics; alternatively, he would lapse into an idealism very much akin to Hegel’s. This is because McDowell’s conceptualism ultimately neglects the role of sensibility in mediating the relation between “mind” and “world”, which is crucial to recognizing the limits on cognition which Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism imposes upon subjects

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

The article presents the views of Benedict Bornstein, formulated in his early writings, such as The Pre-established Transcendental Harmony as the Foundation of Kant’s Theory and The Basic Problem of Kant’s Theory of Cognition. These views pertain to the Kantian dualism of concepts and intuitions and they are presented against the background of the contemporary debate about the contents of perceptual experience. Recognizing the rightness of Bornstein’s claim about the non-conceptual character of the Kantian intuitions, I criticize Bornstein’s solution to the problem of dualism, which necessitates an appeal to the conception of transcendental harmony, established by an act of God’s will.