Dissertation summary
‘Representation’ (Vorstellung) is a key term of art in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Although recent scholarship has produced valuable accounts of Kant’s taxonomies of representations, much of the secondary literature assumes the term means something close to the contemporary notion of a mental item with intentional content. My dissertation explores whether this assumption finds support in the historical philosophical lexicon which informed Kant terminologically, on the one hand, and the way Kant employs this terminology in formulating his account of the mind, on the other.
In the negative part of this study I examine textual, lexical and systematic evidence for aligning Kant’s term Vorstellung with the contemporary term ‘representation’ which implicates correctness conditions and content determinacy. I find this evidence insufficient for attributing semantic representational properties both to Vorstellungen generally, and to two controversial species of Vorstellung, sensations and intuitions.
In the positive portion I propose a univocal reading of Vorstellung as connoting a broad notion of structural correspondence, derived from Leibniz’s influential account of representational ‘expression’. I argue that Kant’s own species of Vorstellung, enumerated in the famous ‘Stufenleiter’ passage, specify this general notion of correspondence in terms of mental forms of unity.
Having established more robust criteria for attributing a semantic notion of representation to Kant, I claim that we can nonetheless read Kant’s notion of cognition representationally. I interpret the relationships between theoretical cognition and other types of Vorstellungen (sensations, intuitions, and the categorial schemata) with reference to contemporary theories of information, content-determination, and representational formats. I draw on the well-studied (in the 20th-21st century literature on representation) gap between mere information and representational content to elucidate Kant’s views about the non-objective nature of sensations and the indeterminacy of intuitions. I interpret Kant’s doctrine of the schematism as bearing on the representational format of cognition, to the effect that the categories must have an iconic format in order to conform to the information presented in intuition.
Publications
(2025). Transcendental Logic and Sellars’ Early Papers. In Mahdi Ranaee & Luz Christopher Seiberth (Eds.), Reading Kant with Sellars: Reconceiving Kantian Themes (Routledge Studies in American Philosophy). Routledge.
(forthcoming). Sellarsian Picturing and Neo-Kantian Theories of Representation. In Carl Sachs (Ed.), Interpreting Sellars: Critical Essays. Cambridge University Press.
(commissioned). Sellars’s Naturalism. In Jeremy Koons (Ed.), The Sellarsian Mind. Routledge.
Peer-reviewed presentations
21/05/2024
‘Cognition, reason and purpose: a “teleosemantic” approach to representational content in Kant’, Kant on Reason, Nature and Freedom / Dublin Kant Fest / UKKS Annual Conference
24/04/2024
‘An Information-theoretic reading of intuition in Kant’, Kant 300 International Conference, Academia Romana, Bucharest, Romania
15/09/2023
‘Synthesis and Representational Format’, Kant and Cognitive Science Workshop co-organized by the Digitales Kant-Zentrum NRW, University of Siegen and Theatre Lo Spazio Vuoto, Imperia, Italy30/09/2022
‘Kant and Explanation in the Sciences of Mind’, Digitales Kant-Zentrum NRW: Opening Workshop, Universität Siegen
27/05/2022
‘Aboutness and Free Linguistic Activity: Transcendental Logic in Sellars’ Early Papers,’ Nature and Norms in a Stereoscopic View: Conference on Wilfrid Sellars’ (meta)philosophy, Corvinus University of Budapest
28/04/2021
‘Representation in Helmholtz and Riehl: Resemblance, Images and Organic Function’, The Era of Neo-Kantianism Colloquium, Instituto de Filosofía Santiago de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales