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Gomes Anil and Stephenson Andrew (eds), Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2017 Pp. xiv+282 9780198724957 (hbk) $60.00
Book Reviews
Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson have compiled a fantastic collection of essays from some of the brightest scholars actively working on issues pertaining to Kant's theory of the mind. While almost all areas of the philosophy of mind are addressed to some degree, the fourteen papers in this volume focus on three issues: intuitions and their objects, the possibility of knowing one's own mind and the relations between judgements. The essays are generally lucid and their arguments informed by the wealth of secondary literature on Kant and often also by contemporary work in the philosophy of mind and related scientific fields. One especially nice feature of the book is that it often has the feel of a symposium, as many essays explicitly cross-reference each other and engage with each other's arguments. In what follows, I'll attempt to give a sense of the main questions, arguments and debates discussed in these essays.
Anil Gomes's introductory essay ('Kant, the Philosophy of Mind, and the Twentieth-Century') does some nice stage-setting. Among other things, it includes a brief history of the reception of Kant's thought in the twentieth century. He catalogues first the rejection of Kant early in the century by British thinkers (especially Moore, Russell, Cook Wilson and Prichard), and then Kant's rehabilitation in the middle of the century (through the work of Lewis, Strawson, Sellars, and then their many students in the next generation).
In the next two essays, Lucy Allais ('Synthesis and Binding') and Katherine Dunlop ('Understanding Non-Conceptual Representation of Objects') present competing interpretations of Kantian intuitions. While both defend non-conceptualism, they offer different takes on the representational content of intuitions. Many conceptualists assume that intuitions are formed through acts of synthesis (and are thereby conceptual), but Allais denies this and claims instead that intuitional content should be understood in terms of what contemporary psychologists and cognitive scientists call sensory 'binding', i.e. the combining of diverse sensory inputs into representations of singular objects. Binding generates intuitions, and synthesis (which she concedes is always conceptual) is something that happens to intuitions that have already been formed.