Kant and Hegel’s Philosophical Thirds: A New Perspective on Explaining Appearances

Melanie Swan, Purdue University

Abstract

Explaining appearances, the problem of specifying the relation between empirical appearances and abstract concepts, continues to confound scholars. Most thinkers concentrate on the terms to be related, as opposed to the structure of how the connection is to be made. Instead, I argue that the important focus should be on the third position that is required to connect the terms. Kant and Hegel both employ philosophical third positions, imagination and self-conscious explanation, respectively, to relate the sensibility and the intellect in the operation of cognition to explain appearances. Their accounts explain appearances by indicating how sensory representations that appear in perception are to be subsumed into abstract yet objective concepts. At the heart of explaining appearances is the problem of time. For Kant, the linchpin is that the understanding must unify time with the categories for any appearance to appear. For Hegel, knowing is a self-developing process, which as processual, is necessarily temporalized. Time (as history) becomes a philosophical object, and both the form and the content of experience are temporalized. It is precisely the problem of time that requires the specification of a philosophical third position to explain appearances, and ultimately deliver the higher-stakes objective conditions of knowing. Kant and Hegel treat the problem of time differently, but both specify a third position to relate determinate content and abstract form. For Kant, the imagination mediates between the sensibility and the understanding. For Hegel, self-conscious explanation provides intelligibility between external appearances and mental structures (concepts). Kant’s conditions for object recognition involve the logical forms of judgment and the categories, and Hegel’s objective conditions for all knowing integrate difference, necessity, otherness, and infinity in the movement of the Concept (a thinking substance and its object). In Chapter 1, I introduce the topic and the three main formulations of the explaining appearances problem. First is Kant’s “Letter to Herz” specification as to the agreement between sense representations and abstract concepts. Second is the contemporary Conceptualism debate’s formulation of the connection between non-conceptual sensibility and conceptual understanding. The Conceptualism debate is an argument about the degree to which the Kantian faculties of intuition (sensibility), imagination, and understanding incorporate conceptual content (the categories). Conceptual means conceptually-determined content per the involvement of the categories (the pure concepts of the understanding that Kant articulates (§10, B106, 212)). Third is the more general formulation of the Humean dilemma addressed by Hegel as the relation of determinate content and abstract form, which is a format that can be sufficiently resolved. In Chapter 2, I argue for a conceptualist reading of Kant’s account of explaining appearances. I resolve some much-debated ambiguities that arise in §26 and the B160 note. The central issue in explaining appearances for Kant is the generation of the a priori unity of space and time, per the formal intuition of space and time as specified in §26 and the B160 note. I frame my argument in terms of the Conceptualism debate (the extent to which Kant’s notion of intuition is category-determined and how this influences the unicity of time and space).

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Smith, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Epistemology|Philosophy|Cognitive psychology|Psychology

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