Maximilian Edwards

Within Kant scholarship, there is an entrenched tendency to distinguish, on Kant’s behalf, between pure and ‘schematized’ categories. There is also a widespread tendency to view the schematized categories as conceptually richer than the pure categories. I argue that this reading of the distinction, which I call the standard view, should be rejected. In its place, I draw on a neglected part of Kant’s theory of marks – namely, his account of ‘synthetic attributes’ – to propose an account of the distinction that preserves a strict identity between pure and schematized categories at the level of analysable content.

Kant scholars have tended to treat his theory of empirical concepts as monolithic. Against this tendency, I show that Kant systematically distinguishes between two kinds of empirical concepts: ‘concepts of experience,’ on the one hand, and ‘given empirical concepts,’ on the other. I develop an interpretation of this distinction on which given empirical concepts, unlike their experiential counterparts, represent intrinsic features of subjective sensations, in this respect resembling the ‘phenomenal concepts’ invoked in the contemporary philosophy of mind. I go on to show that appreciating this distinction yields a novel account of Kant’s infamous distinction between judgments of perception and experience.

Kant announces a ‘Copernican turn’ in philosophy, but the model of cognition from which he claims to be ‘turning’ resurfaces in his own constructive account of empirical conceptual content. For Kant, no less than for his ‘pre-Copernican’ predecessors, empirical concepts are a species of representation that ‘conform to’ their objects. But if Kant does not excise the pre-Copernican model of cognition from his positive picture, in what does his turn from it consist? I argue that Kant’s target is not the legitimacy but the explanatory sufficiency of the pre-Copernican model. Kant’s critical gesture towards that model consists in showing that cognition can only exhibit the structure envisaged by the pre-Copernican system if it is underwritten by a kind of content - viz. transcendental content - which cannot be modeled in pre-Copernican terms. A full appreciation of Kant’s Copernicanism thus requires an account of transcendental conceptual content, and its relation to empirical conceptual content. Drawing on Kant’s account of the transcendental object and other neglected textual resources, I develop such an account.