Kant and the determinacy of intuition

Abstract

A central issue in debates about Kant and nonconceptualism concerns the nature of intuition. There is sharp disagreement among Kant scholars about both whether, prior to conceptualization, mere intuition can be considered conscious and, if so, how determinate this consciousness is. In this article, I argue that Kant regards pre-synthesized intuition as conscious but indeterminate. To make this case, I contextualize Kant's position through the work of H.S. Reimarus, a predecessor of Kant who influenced his views on animals, infants, and the role of attention. I use Reimarus to clarify Kant's otherwise ambiguous commitments on the determinacy of intuition in animals and newborns, and the role attention, concepts, and judgment play in making intuited contents determinate. This contextualization helps to shed light on Kant's discussion of pre-synthesized intuition in the threefold synthesis of the A-Deduction by demonstrating that Kant's theory of mind in the deduction offers transcendental grounding for empirical accounts of infant development like Kant and Reimarus's. The upshot is a Kant at odds with many recent interpretations of his theory of mind:pre-synthesized intuition is conscious but indeterminate. "In the beginning, the entire content of our sensations and sensory representations […] are unseparated and undistinguished, almost like a single sensation; thus, the first task of the soul must have been to separate and distribute them into heaps. The result was that the inner sensations formed a class, the outer sensations of the body another, and the sensations from external objects a third, which were then perceived as a distinct kind." (Tetens, 1777, pp. 371-372) A central issue in debates about Kant and nonconceptualism concerns the nature of intuition. At a minimum, Kant is committed to a logically separable notion of intuition: "Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking" (CPR A91/B123). 1 But there is sharp disagreement among Kant scholars about the cognitive significance of intuition on its own, prior to the work of