A priori workshop: John Callanan

John gave a paper entitled 'Kant's a priori and seeing how things must be'. In it he distinguished between two types of necessity that get talked about, and not always kept apart, in the first Critique. The first is the familiar necessity of synthetic a priori truths about the transcendental structure of experience - the necesary conditions of possibilty of experience that hold with 'strict universality' for any thinker/perceiver as such. The second is the necessity which attaches to certain experiences, so that we literally, in the course of experience, 'see' that, say, a certain temporal ordering of events is necessary rather than contingent. In uncovering this second source of necessary truths, Kant is very roughly doing a kind of phenomenology influenced still very much by the early modern philosophy that preceded him. For instance, very much influenced by Hume's reflections on how sense impressions are given to the mind and ordered by it in certain ways. What Kant changed was the Humean demarcation between the given and constituting elements of experience (for example, the representation from which the concept space is derived is constituted not given for Kant). Also, concepts derived from what is constituted are legitimate for Kant, whereas they are not for Hume. This is because for Kant they are a necessay condition of the very experience in question (for example, the constituting element of the causal principle is a necessary condition for Kant of the possibility of us experiencing certain sorts of temporal order at all).

But John also argued that for a lot of Kant's arguments in the Critique, he is concerned not with so called transcendental arguments, but rather with a phenomenological analysis of the understanding at work in experience. Kant works with quite a rich conception of experience and John's focus was his analysis of how we 'see' that something is the case, like when we see that in turning a cube a certain coloured side is bound to reappear at a certain point. We might say then, that the focus is on an a 'seeing that' which is suffuse with the conceptual activity of the understanding.

This general approach has ramifications for how we view Kant's philosophical project. John argued that we tend to see Kant through Frege's anti-psychologistic spectacles, that we see him as concerned with the conditions of possibility of thinking per se. But on John's view, Kant is far closer to Hume. He is involved in a phenomenology of experience that uncovers constituting elements that are merely human. Of course, this interpretation will effect how we think of the Kantian a priori. That is, on John's account it quantifies over a far more limited domain of individuals than it is often taken to.

I for one think John's approach is fruitful and probably right, certainly as a reading of the Aesthetic and the Analogies. But there seems to be a problem over the Transcendental Deduction, which appears to be concerned with the conditions of possibility of thinking as such. But there is a way out: perhaps Kant is concerned in those sections, as McDowell has argued, with another problem: that of intentionality. The TD could then be seen as arguing for certain a priori concepts that constitute thoughts and perceptions alike, so that perceptions have a certain minimal conceptual content. Kant's universalism about logic then becomes detatchable from the TD and it can fit with John's overrall interpretative approach of seeing Kant as concerned with analysing phenomenologically the understanding at work in experience.