Kant Workshop: Allais

Lucy Allais' workshop paper, "Kant's Transcendental Turn and the Argument for Space", contained an account of what makes the transcendental turn transcendental, a discussion of the nature of intuition, and the significance of the Transcendental Aesthetic for (hard) naturalism. I think it is probably fair to say that the aspect of the paper that attracted most attention in discussion was the claim that Kant views the a priori representation of space as delivering a non-conceptual awareness of particulars.

The main thrust was that only in such a fashion can we understand a number of Kant's remarks concerning intuition and the epistemological role it plays in cognition. The consequence for hard naturalism was that there are features of the world knowledge of which is essentially gained from the point of view of conscious experience.

A number of questions in the discussion focussed on the issue of non-conceptual content. The question seems to be in what way intuition can be said to present us with bounded, individuated objects if it has not come under some for of conceptualisation. Further, the view seems to have the consequence that we could synthesise the manifold without the categories, and that we could have consciousness without self-consciousness - both results with perhaps a rather un-Kantian ring. However, and here it matters how we define conceptual content, there was certainly some sympathy with the thought that there is some textual evidence for a view of Kant as allowing a non-conceptual awareness of particulars, and that that it would make sense of, for example, the incongruent counterparts argument.