Lucas Janz (Corpus Christi College): 'Intuitive Acquaintance and Imagination in Kant'
Abstract: Relational views of what Kant calls ‘intuition’ hold that intuitions relate to their objects via non-representational relations of conscious acquaintance. Such views entail that intuitions depend on the intuited object existing and being present to the subjects mind concurrently with their intuition. Andrew Stephenson has recently argued that this commitment, and by extension the relational view of intuition that entails it, is inconsistent with Kant’s claim that ‘imagination is (the faculty of) intuition even without the presence of the object’. I show that this is false. Kant holds that intuition depends on the presence of some ‘indeterminate object’ with which it acquaints us. This is even the case for intuitions of imagination which acquaint us with our own mental states. What he denies, is that intuitions always ‘determinately’ represent that object as it is. This is compatible with a relational view of intuition.
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Ockham Society Convenors: Jack Tristani, Yuxin Tang and Meredith Ross-James | Ockham Society Webpage
