Kimberly Brewer

I pursue Kant's characterization of the ideas of reason as the ‘divinity of our soul’ with the aim of correcting a highly influential reading of his philosophy as rejecting the theocentric cognitive model, one measuring human cognition against the norm of the divine intuitive intellect. I begin by establishing the reliance of the Critical epistemology on such a model. This reliance comes to light in Kant's theory of the epistemic role of ‘ideas of reason’ as fashioning our cognition “after the model of the intuitive (archetypical) understanding,” or as he also says, after “a highest reason of which our reason is only a weak copy.” I then explore the common Platonic origins of Kant's doctrine of ideas and theory of the intuitive intellect. This reveals how the imputed function of ideas represents a self-conscious nod to the theocentric model of Plato's “spiritual flight” towards a God's-eye view of reality, an endeavor Kant describes as “deserving respect and imitation.”

Kant's theory of the intuitive intellect has a broad and substantial role in the development and exposition of his critical philosophy. An emphasis on this theory's reception and appropriation on the part of the German idealists has tended to divert attention from Kant's own treatment of the topic. In this essay, I seek an adequate overview of the theory Kant advances in support of his critical enterprise. I examine the nature of the intuitive intellect's object; its epistemic relation to its object; its mode of comprehension; the relationship between these cognitive elements; and I ask which minds Kant regards as intuitive intellects.

A philosophically and historically influential section of the Critique of Judgement presents an ‘intuitive intellect’ as a mind whose representation is limited to what actually exists, and does not extend to mere possibilities. Kant’s paradigmatic instance of such an intellect is however also the divine mind. This combination threatens to rule out the reality of the mere possibilities presupposed by Kant’s theory of human freedom. Through an analysis of the relevant issues in metaphysical cosmology, modal metaphysics and philosophical theology, I show that Kant in fact possesses the resources to reconcile the philosophical claims of §76 of the Critique of Judgement with his keystone commitment to the reality of human freedom.

This dissertation consists of three independent essays treating Kant’s notion of an intuitive intellect. I provide a brief description of each below: 1. In §76 of the third Critique, Kant characterizes an intuitive intellect as a mind that represents the world only as it is. Taken together with his commitment to a divine intuitive intellect, this gives rise to a problem: If God does not represent other ways the world could be, it would seem to follow that there is no other way the world could be, which would be an unwelcome implication for Kant given his commitment to a conception of human freedom that presupposes that our moral characters could be other than they are. The first essay of this dissertation explores the philosophical resources Kant has to reconcile these commitments. 2. According to a received view, Kant maintains that only God could possess an intuitive intellect, i.e., a mind with an ‘intellectual intuition’ or, equivalently, an ‘intuitive understanding’ of objects. Such a view finds support in the first Critique, for instance, where Kant writes, "intellectual intuition […] seems to pertain only to the original being" and in lecture transcripts where we read, "[o]nly the understanding of God is called intuition." However, such a view is also brought into question by neglected texts suggesting that it involves a considerable oversimplification of his position. The second essay of this dissertation examines these texts in an effort to illuminate Kant’s conceptions of the intuitive and human intellects. 3. Scribbled in the margins of Kant’s copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, we read: "That is the divinity of our soul, that it is capable of ideas." This final essay pursues this description of our ideas as "the divinity of our soul" with the aim of correcting a popular but misleading narrative that the critical Kant flatly rejects a theocentric model on which human cognition is measured against the norm of the divine intuitive intellect. Along the way, it also suggests a significant and ultimately illuminating Platonic influence on Kant’s notion of an intuitive intellect and on the critical philosophy more broadly.

In a short and much-neglected passage in the second Critique, Kant discusses the threat posed to human freedom by theological determinism. In this paper we present an interpretation of Kant’s conception of and response to this threat. Regarding his conception, we argue that he addresses two versions of the threat: either God causes appearances (and hence our spatio-temporal actions) directly or he does so indirectly by causing things in themselves which in turn cause appearances. Kant’s response to the first version is that God cannot cause appearances directly because they depend essentially on the passive sensibility of finite beings. Kant’s response to the second version is that human beings are endowed with transcendental freedom, which blocks the causal transitivity that is presupposed by this version. We also contrast his position on this topic with Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s.