Conceptuality of Experience
| dc.contributor.advisor | Macbeth, Danielle | |
| dc.contributor.author | Ding, Joe | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-08-18T17:22:32Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-08-18T17:22:32Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022 | |
| dc.description.abstract | In Mind and World, John McDowell makes a Kantian thesis that the two faculties of human knowledge – sensibility and understanding – are inextricably combined, in particular, that the sphere in which the faculty of understanding is operative is unbounded. He explicates this thesis by suggesting that concepts, despite belonging to the side of understanding, are passively drawn into operation in the workings of sensibility. I argue that the "passive operation" account fails to do justice to his original Kantian thesis. Alternatively, I defend the inextricable-combination thesis by building on a proposed reading of the Transcendental Deduction in Critique of Pure Reason. I read Kant as telling us here that it is constitutive of pure concepts to be involved in experience, which enables us to understand the conceptuality of experience in a way that does not invoke the puzzling notion of the passive involvement of concepts. On the proposed account, the co-operation between intuition and concepts is indeed inextricable: pure concepts have no other use than to be applied to intuition so that the latter can fully realize its cognitive role of giving an object to the mind. To fully make sense of the idea of conceptuality of experience, we need a new picture of the kind of interaction between mind and world in experience, which amounts to a reconsideration of what knowledge and its objectivity are. | |
| dc.description.award | The Charles Schwartz Memorial Prize in Philosophy | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Haverford College. Department of Philosophy | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10066/24559 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.rights.access | Open Access | |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ | |
| dc.title | Conceptuality of Experience | |
| dc.type | Thesis |