August Buholzer

When discussing ‘representations’ (Vorstellungen) in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, many authors default to one of two basic approaches: (1) anything Kant calls a Vorstellung has some sort of semantic representational content (the Content Reading), or (2) Vorstellungen which do not have representational content are an exception to the rule, and present a puzzle to be solved (the Incongruity Reading). I argue that both these positions are mistaken. I first clarify the connotations of Vorstellung in the post-Leibnizian context from which Kant inherited the term. I argue that Leibniz’s notion of representational ‘expression’ and historical debates about the mind-body relationship illuminate Kant’s use of this term of art, while showing that the Content Reading and the Incongruity Reading falter in attributing to Kant a contemporary sense of ‘representation’ linked to semantic content. As an alternative, I develop the view that Kant’s Vorstellungen are mental forms of unity proper to the mind’s different faculties, which unify multiplicities in their respective ways. ‘Representations’ are ways of unifying multiplicities first and foremost, and it is a further question how features of these forms of unification could support an account of semantic representation.

Sellars’s long-neglected account of picturing has recently found more sympathetic interpretations. At the same time, there has been more sustained engagement with Sellars’s Kantianism. However, there has not yet been an inquiry into the notion of picturing in 19th and 20th century Neo-Kantian philosophy prior to Sellars. This chapter examines how neo-Kantians such as Helmholtz, Riehl, and Hertz developed ‘picture’ theories of representation to bring out epistemological consequences of post-Kantian developments in the sciences. Sellars’s version of the concept of picturing is considered in relation to these accounts, and is thus situated within a longer tradition of naturalistic interpretations of Kant.

This chapter discusses Sellars’ early (pre-1950) essays in the context of his ambition to articulate a Kantian turn within the philosophical landscape of the ‘new way of words’. Buholzer takes up Sellars’ contention that his own project of ‘pure pragmatics’ might be compared to Kant’s transcendental logic, specifically the idea that a transcendental turn brings in a focus on the content of language or thought. Buholzer assesses the evidence for this parallel in Sellars’ early essays, not in the interest of vindicating a Sellarsian reading of Kant’s transcendental logic but in order to map out Sellars’ indirect engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy in this period. This comparative lens provides new insight into Sellars’ career-long preoccupation with ‘aboutness’, or intentionality, and the abandonment of his early formalist project.

‘Representation’ (Vorstellung) is a key term of art in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Although recent scholarship has produced valuable accounts of Kant’s taxonomies of representations, much of the secondary literature assumes the term means something close to the contemporary notion of a mental item with intentional content. My dissertation explores whether this assumption finds support in the historical philosophical lexicon which informed Kant terminologically, on the one hand, and the way Kant employs this terminology in formulating his account of the mind, on the other.