After Parmenides by Tom Rockmore;

Author:Tom Rockmore; [Rockmore, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 Philosophy / General, PHI009000 Philosophy / History & Surveys / General, PHI013000 Philosophy / Metaphysics
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Kant and Representationalism

It is difficult to relate Kant’s accounts of representationalism and constructivism to his theory of the future science of metaphysics. Kant’s career is routinely understood, as he suggests, to be divided into early dogmatic, precritical (hence prephilosophical), and later critical philosophical periods. Following Kant’s suggestion, the “Inaugural Dissertation” (1770) is routinely considered the dividing point between Kant’s early so-called dogmatic slumber and his later critical period. The “Dissertation” distinguishes between sensibility and understanding, each of which is concerned with cognition of a different object, or the sensible and the intelligible worlds. According to this view, knowledge of the intelligible world, which is not sensible, is a priori since it correctly grasps what is.

Kant continued to work on this problem over many years. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he later abandoned the view that there is cognition of the intelligible world. The change in position is signaled in the important letter to Markus Herz.49 Kant here adumbrates the position he later expounds in the first edition of the Critique (1781). In the second edition of this treatise (1787), he moves away from representationalism and toward constructivism.

Representationalism and constructivism are both clearly linked to the Parmenidean thesis (the view that the subject and object are the same) but incompatible. In the “Dissertation” and other early writings, Kant adopts a representationalist approach to cognition that he later abandons for constructivism. As the term suggests, representationalism refers to a cognitive approach based on representation, or the view that we can correctly represent what is. On the contrary, we can informally describe constructivism as the view that we can only cognize what we in some sense construct.

In his important Herz letter, Kant abandons the view advanced in the “Dissertation” in a seminal passage that deserves to be cited at length:

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