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2 - Synthetic Judgment and Intuition

The Sensibility/Understanding Distinction in the “Introduction”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024

Daniel Smyth
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University, Connecticut
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Summary

I argue that the sensibility/understanding distinction announced at the end of Kant’s Introduction to the Critique can be justified via pure apperception. I first defend an account of the analytic/synthetic distinction, arguing that analytic judgments articulate intellectual grounds of truth. Synthetic judgments, then, are based on nonintellectual grounds of truth. This provides Kant’s “baseline conception” of receptive intuition as a capacity for representing nonintellectual grounds of truth. This is a “top-down” approach to intuition: a characterization of intuition not in terms of its intrinsic properties but in terms of a prior account of the intellect and its cognitive needs. I then argue that this version of the analytic/synthetic distinction follows from the idea that judgment must track the truth – an idea that is available to us via pure apperception. Thus, Kant’s baseline conception of intuition, as expressed in the sensibility/understanding distinction, can be justified via pure apperception.

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Intuition in Kant
The Boundlessness of Sense
, pp. 44 - 72
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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