Hemmo Laiho

It may be that Kant’s inherently communal concept of taste is a morally laden notion that blurs the line between the good and the beautiful, on the one hand, and moral evaluation and aesthetic appreciation, on the other. In particular, it can be shown how, on Kant’s view, moralistic factors, such as considerations of social appropriateness, enter into estimations of aesthetic value. Moreover, Kant’s tendency to overlap taste and morals suggests an underlying assumption operative in Kant’s aesthetics. According to this ‘decency assumption’, as I have termed it, taste is first and foremost a trait of people with certain supposedly refined socio-moral characteristics. Kant also seems to think that having good taste and a morally good character go hand in hand. Even though we do find separate sets of ultimate principles in Kant’s ethics and aesthetics, the aforesaid assumption nevertheless implies a shared ground between these two branches of philosophy and thereby links them tightly together, contrary to the common view that ethics and aesthetics are distinct enterprises. In addition, Kant’s morally laden conception of taste will be shortly examined in relation to the Enlightenment project as Kant saw it and our contemporary world.

We argue that Kant advocates existence dualism in a largely Cartesian vein. In such a dualism, there are two basic kinds of existence or ways of being: I-existence and categorial existence. I-existence denotes my existence, while categorial existence denotes, basically, the existence of ordinary things. First, we show how the route to existence is fundamentally different in the two cases. Then we ask whether they also indicate two ontologically distinct kinds and argue that I-existence should be regarded as the fundamental kind of existence in any case. One important consequence of this is that I-existence stands outside the Kantian conditions of experience, being the one un-Copernican element left intact after Kant’s Copernican turn.

The paper argues that much of Kant’s largely formalistic account of aesthetic appreciation stands on the idea that the judger is able to engage with the object of her judgment purely sensibly and hence non-conceptually or non-cognitively. This is to say that the judger must be able to ground her judgment on the immediate sensory affection by the object or on the object’s sensible form. The paper also argues that these two purely sensible grounds, accessible in the aesthetic examination of objects, underlie the feeling involved in such judgments. In broader terms, the paper outlines how Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment suggests what might be called a contemplative model of perception.

Kant uses terms translatable as ‘synthesis’ and ‘perception’ in different ways in different contexts, which suggests that there are different kinds of synthesis and perception. I propose that there are two main basic functions of perception according to Kant: that of singling out a thing and that of getting perceptually informed about the configuration of the thing’s perceptible features. I argue that the first function is not dependent on the kinds of syntheses Kant analyzes in the Critique of Pure Reason but grounds any such synthesis. I also argue that if singling out a thing is considered to involve synthesis, then the term ‘synthesis’ is identified with a unification of sensory information itself, which is not of much consequence for the transcendental philosopher. The paper also aims to clarify what ‘manifold’ consists in and what the starting point of the ‘synthesis in apprehension’ might be.

In this essay, I specify types of representational content that can be attributed to Kant’s account of representation. The more specific aim is to examine which of these types of content can be regarded as possible without the application of concepts. In order to answer the question, I proceed as follows. First, I show how intuition (in Kant’s sense) can be seen as providing indexical content independently of empirical concepts. Second, I show in what sense the generation of spatial content can be regarded as non-categorial. A key distinction is that a perceptual examination of an object can be understood as thoroughly sensible and particular, whereas a conceptual determination always grasps the object via its generalisable features. Third, I propose that the faculties of sensibility and understanding are not only separable in principle, but that their contributions remain in a certain sense separate in actual cognition as well. This is to say that a conceptual determination of an object does not entail that the object ceases to be non-conceptually available to the perceiver, which further suggests the autonomy of sensibility and its perceptual content. Finally, I raise difficulties in attributing non-conceptual representational content to Kant’s judgment-centered stance on representation and experience, only to emphasise how these difficulties easily lead to a misappreciation of Kant’s fundamental distinction between sensibility and understanding and their unique cognitive contributions.

In order to secure the limits of the critical use of reason, and to succeed in the critique of speculative metaphysics, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had to present a full account of human cognitive experience. Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience is a detailed investigation of this aspect of Kant’s grand enterprise with a special focus: perception. The overarching goal is to understand this common phenomenon both in itself and as the key to understanding Kant’s views of experience. In the process, the author argues against any such reading of Kant that puts too much emphasis on concepts and understanding in perception. This means that claims of the sort that intuitions cannot play their role without concepts, that sensibility cannot bring anything to cognition without being mediated through the functions of understanding, or that there is no such thing as concept-independent perception, are shown to be either plainly false or misleading at best. Together with the contemporary topics examined by the end of the book, the findings suggest how the role of conceptual thinking in human cognition has been exaggerated partly because of a misplaced interpretation of Kant, which not only makes perception far more intellectual in character than what was intended by Kant himself, but distorts Kant’s account of cognition by overlooking what there is at the heart of his critical philosophy: the revaluation of sensible cognition.

In this paper, I investigate Kant’s view of the cognitive role of perceptions, judgements, and the three categories of Quality in representing negative states of affairs. The paper addresses the following problem. In his account of empirical cognition, Kant seems to limit the legitimate application of the categories to things perceptually available to us, or, more generally, to positive cases. However, Kant also seems to hold that negative states of affairs, such as the absence of a thing, cannot be perceived. This raises the question of how we can represent and make warranted empirical judgements about cases that lack positive instances given in perception. At worst, Kant’s view would imply that thoughts about negative cases are ‘empty’. In order to avoid such a consequence, I wish to draw attention to Kant’s holistic way of thinking. In particular, I shall argue that perception is a process-like temporal phenomenon, and that experience itself is not strictly about the here and now. The paper shows that the cognitive contribution of the categories, according to Kant, is most explicit in representing negative states of affairs, which requires overcoming the main limitation of sense perception, namely the incapacity of negative representation. Even so, positive representation can be seen cognitively primary for Kant.

In contemporary terms, this short paper is about perceptual reference. In Kant‘s terms, the topic is intuition. The main explanandum is that intuition can indeed be understood in terms of perceptual reference. More specifically, I examine two issues with two intermingled questions: How, on the one hand, should intuition be understood when it comes to perceptually referring to locally present macroscopic objects, such as chairs and tables? How, on the other hand, should intuition be understood when it comes to perceptually referring to huge objects that cannot be perceptually present to us in their entirety, such as oceans, galaxies, and ultimately the world itself?