Much of the discussion in the current debate about nonconceptualism concerns the nature of the debate itself: what exactly do conceptualists and nonconceptualists disagree about? Some of the papers in this recent collection frame the debate as one about the possibility of nonconceptual mental content: nonconceptualists maintain that representations with nonconceptual content are possible, while conceptualists deny the possibility (Hanna, Land, Onof, Heidemann). Others frame the debate in terms of capacities: are conceptual capacities presupposed by nonconceptual, intuitive representations, or is the capacity for nonconceptual intuition independent of conceptual capacities (Allais, Golob, McLear)? The collection is dominated by ‘nonconceptualist’ answers to both questions, indicating that the growing consensus in Kant scholarship is that Kant acknowledges nonconceptual mental content, and that intuitions are capable of providing singular, immediate acquaintance with objects independently of conceptual capacities. In the following, I provide a brief summary of the essays in the volume, before discussing its philosophical merits.

According to Allais, the conceptualism/nonconceptualism debate should concern the question whether intuitions can ‘play their role of being singular and immediate representations that give us objects independently of their being conceptualized’ (p. 5). Allais, like McLear, argues that intuitions do not depend on being conceptualized for their possibility as intuitions (singular and immediate representations). According to Allais, this way of thinking is compatible with the claim (often put forward by conceptualist interpreters) that intuitions are transformed by concepts when concepts are applied to them.

Golob frames the debate in terms of capacities: the nonconceptualist maintains that the human has the ‘capacity to intuit spatiotemporal particulars’ independently of having the capacity ‘to deploy concepts’ (p. 27). Golob’s aim is to show how the transcendental deduction is compatible with nonconceptualism in this sense. The categories are needed only to represent certain relations in experience, not for intuitions in general.

Gomes and Stephenson lay out different interpretations of the relation between intuition and its object, with particular focus on the question of whether the existence of an intuition depends on the existence of its object. They claim that the way in which one answers this question will determine how one thinks of cognition and of the role of the categories in experience.

Grüne argues that the metaphysical exposition of the Transcendental Aesthetic does not imply ‘sensibilism’, or the view that intuitions of objects do not require intellectual synthesis, and that the Aesthetic instead suggests that Kant adheres to a kind of intellectualism, according to which all objective representation depends on the unifying function of syntheses of the understanding.

Hanna defines nonconceptualism as the view that ‘at least some of the representational contents of human cognition are not essentially conceptual’ or ‘determined by our conceptual capacities’ (p. 101). He draws a connection between Kant’s nonconceptualism in this sense and his transcendental idealism, or the view that objects must conform to our forms of sensibility (and hence to the structure of the receptive mind). Hanna argues that nonconceptualism and transcendental idealism are deeply rooted in Kant’s thought and can be traced back to his pre-Critical period.

Heidemann turns our attention to the Critique of the Power of Judgement for a defence of Kantian nonconceptualism. According to Heidemann, nonconceptual mental content is a condition of the possibility of the aesthetic experience of beauty, and hence is essential to Kant’s overall project in the third Critique. Even aesthetic ideas must be distinguished from concepts and should be thought of as having nonconceptual content. But nonconceptualism belongs only to Kant’s understanding of the reception of beautiful works, not to his account of its production through genius.

Land argues for a conceptualist view of intuition, or the view that conceptual capacities are presupposed by intuitive representations of objects. In particular, Kant’s theory of spatial representation does not support nonconceptualism, understood as the view that concepts play no role in providing intuitions with the unity required for being representations of objects. On the contrary, the representation of determinate spaces, Land argues, requires a synthesis that constitutes an exercise of spontaneity. Although this act of spontaneity is distinct from the synthesis of judgement, it can in a broader sense be considered intellectual or ‘conceptual’.

McLear’s essay focuses on the notion of ‘content’ in Kant, which is often employed within the conceptualism/nonconceptualism debate, but is rarely explicated. McLear argues that Kant can agree with a broadly contemporary notion of content as that which is (a) the object of propositional attitudes, (b) communicable across different subjects and (c) the bearer of truth and falsity. Contents differ from one another because they specify different veridicality conditions for different mental states. To extend this notion of content to intuitions, McLear distinguishes the descriptive content of judgments, whose veridicality conditions can be satisfied by multiple objects, from the content of an intuition, whose veridicality condition can be satisfied only by one object. McLear proposes that the conceptualism/nonconceptualism debate should be reframed as a debate not about whether or not intuitions have conceptual content (the answer to which he takes to be negative), but whether or not concepts enter into the generation of intuitions, or whether conceptual capacities are presupposed by intuitions. Finally, McLear argues that Kant is a nonconceptualist in the sense that the intellect (or understanding) is not involved in making the objective, sensible representations possible that give us acquaintance with an object. On the contrary, sensible representations, independent of the intellect, are required for proving the real possibility of the objects of cognition.

Onof argues that cognition has more than just conceptual content, and that representations are possible whose content is merely nonconceptual (e.g. mere associations). Like conceptualists, Onof argues that there is a dependence of nonconceptual representations on conceptual ones, but unlike conceptualists, he argues that not all nonconceptual representations have conceptual content.

Schulting reviews the claim made by interpretations inspired by Hegel, in particular that of Robert Pippin, according to which Kant overcomes the strict divide between concepts and intuitions in the transcendental deduction. According to Schulting, these interpretations over-intellectualize experience and fail to acknowledge the philosophical lessons of Kant’s nonconceptualism.

Finally, Tolley argues for a sharp distinction between the original intuition of space, the metaphysical representation of space that rests on the a priori concept of space and the geometrical representation of space through the construction of concepts of space in intuition. Only the first, original intuition of space is independent of all concepts of space and of any activity of the understanding, while the latter two representations of space, which also appear in the Transcendental Aesthetic, depend for their possibility on conceptual representation.

One weakness of the conceptualism/nonconceptualism debate is that it presupposes concepts that are themselves obscure: what does Kant mean by content (whether nonconceptual or conceptual), and what does he mean by concept? It is tempting to read contemporary notions of ‘content’ and ‘concept’ back into Kant, but the more interesting question is whether Kant can teach us how to rethink these notions, and how to think of their relevance for cognition in general. For instance, why does Kant draw a close connection between concepts and the ‘analytic unity of apperception’ or self-consciousness, and what is the role of self-consciousness in representations of objects? What is content, and how does it relate to the acts or activities of thinking, judging, perceiving and intuiting? Would Kant accept our post-Fregean distinctions between reference and content (sense), or between the assertoric force of a judgement and its content? In order to assess the philosophical merits of conceptualist versus nonconceptualist interpretations of Kant, it is important that we first get clear on what he thinks concepts are. For instance, if concepts are merely discriminating capacities that enable us to sort objects into classes, it would seem that conceptual capacities play a role in all intuitive representations of objects – indeed, perhaps less sophisticated abilities of this sort are involved even in animal perception. But if concepts are instead representations of the being of an object (or what-it-is-to-be the object), they may not play a role in all intuitions of objects, and may be different in kind from the sort of capacities that can be attributed to animals. Although the current debate does seem to be arriving at a consensus that Kant thought that intuitions of objects are possible that do not involve the deployment of conceptual capacities, there is insufficient discussion of the philosophical significance of this claim. And there can be no such discussion, I think, if the debate does not shift to an investigation of the nature of concepts, and of the role of spontaneity or activity and self-consciousness in cognition. Perhaps, once the debate shifts to these topics, we will gain a better understanding of what the debate is about.