Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- References to Kant's Works
- Introduction
- 1 The Centrality of the Problem of Formalism
- 2 Formalism and the Circle of Representation
- 3 Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
- 4 The Deep Structure of Synthesis
- 5 The Completion of the Subjective Deduction in the Deductions of the Critique of Judgement
- 6 A Priori Knowledge as the Anticipation of a Material Given and the Need for a Spatial Schematism
- 7 Empirical Systematicity and its Relation to Aesthetic Judgement
- 8 Aesthetic Judgement's Exemplary Exhibition of Cognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Author/subject index
3 - Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- References to Kant's Works
- Introduction
- 1 The Centrality of the Problem of Formalism
- 2 Formalism and the Circle of Representation
- 3 Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
- 4 The Deep Structure of Synthesis
- 5 The Completion of the Subjective Deduction in the Deductions of the Critique of Judgement
- 6 A Priori Knowledge as the Anticipation of a Material Given and the Need for a Spatial Schematism
- 7 Empirical Systematicity and its Relation to Aesthetic Judgement
- 8 Aesthetic Judgement's Exemplary Exhibition of Cognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Author/subject index
Summary
In the previous chapter I have identified a problem in the accounts given by some of Kant's principal defenders of the relation between representations and objects. While Buchdahl, Allison and Longuenesse provide a robust defence of Kant's formalism, each of their accounts fail to give an adequate account of the relation in which form stands to matter. I will now offer an alternative account of the relation between representation and material given.
In the first section of this chapter, I discuss how Kant's characterisation of his epistemological project as amounting to formal, as opposed to material, idealism reveals his commitment to an extramental world of objects. Only the form of experience is initiated by our minds.
In the second section, I turn to Kant's ‘Copernican revolution’, which has often been taken to be a corner stone of his commitment to the view that mind imposes order on the world. I suggest that it need not be read in this way, because of a limitation on the range of its scope and also because it comprises two stages, the first of which concerns our receptivity to an affect given in experience.
Next I examine some of the passages in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ that most invite an impositionalist reading and suggest an alternative perspective according to which representation is our mode of access to an extra-mental given. Having established this in principle in the third section, in the fourth I argue that the account of affectivity such a perspective would require is in fact provided in the opening paragraphs of the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant's Aesthetic EpistemologyForm and World, pp. 86 - 111Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007