UC San Diego

The aim of this PhD is to make headway in understanding Kant’s theory of cognition, and my strategy in pursuing that aim is to investigate his account of concept-formation. I argue that what Kant has to say on this topic is more extensive and insightful than has previously been recognized, and that it bears directly on his theory of cognition. To reach this conclusion, the dissertation splits into three parts. Part 1 lays out some fundamental doctrines in Kant’s theory of concepts and articulates the various interpretive approaches that have been taken to them. I show here that Kant’s account of concept-formation assumes a hylomorphic account of concepts, which distinguishes them into a universal form and a given ‘matter’ — a set of given, intrinsicially non-conceptual representations that constitute the subjective generation-base of the concept. A proper account of the origins of concepts, by Kant’s own lights, must explain both the ‘matter giving’ acts that bring these nonconceptual representations to consciousness and the ‘form imparting’ acts that convert them into concepts. The second and third parts of the dissertation explore, respectively, the material and formal dimensions of Kant’s account of the origins of concepts. Part 2 studies the matter-giving acts that pertain to the origin of ‘sensible’ concepts (Chapters 3 and 4), and the concepts ‘of understanding’ or categories (Chapter 5). The act that Kant names apprehension, I argue, is the common matter-giving act underlying all sensible concepts; reflection, I argue, is the act that underlies the categories. This account has the revisionary implication that Kant’s doctrine of imagination has its primary theoretical home within his account of concept-formation, not, as is commonly assumed, in his account of intuition-formation. The final part epxlores the three ‘logical acts’ to which Kant famously traces the universal form of concepts: comparison, reflection, and abstraction. Chapter 6 deals with the relationship between comparison and schemata; Chapter 7 situates the doctrines of reflection and abstraction within Kant’s account of the unity of apperception; and Chapter 8 draws on the findings of Chapter 7 to make good on the suggestion that the categories of understanding originate in reflection. The result is an account that clarifies key doctrines from Kant’s published works and also yields a heterodox conception of both the nature of concepts and the relationship between intellect and sensibility. On the account I propose, Kantian concepts are not mere rules or dispositions: they are mental representations of properties, whose content is fixed prior to and indepedently of the judgments in which they can feature. And the faculty of understanding, I argue, is much more intimately connected with the faculty of sensibility than has been supposed. Though my reading stops short of collapsing the distinction between understanding and imagination, it makes the case that understanding depends not merely causally but constitutively on the faculty of sensibility, and that the traces of sensibility can be detected both in the essence of the faculty of understanding and in the contents of its pure concepts.