Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics Kant took sensibility and understanding to be two fundamental and related capacities of the human mind . Objects are given to us through sensibility but thought by understanding. Sensibility is the capacity to have representations through being affected by objects, and operates in two ways. As outer sense , sensibility produces sensory states of things outside us; as inner sense , sensibility produces sensory states of our own representations. For Kant, sensibility is receptive but not passive, for there is a formal aspect as well as a material aspect. The forms of sensibility are space and time , which are a priori intuitions , not derived from the independent properties of objects as they are in themselves. Space and time set the order for matter , and hence matter received in sensibility is spatially and temporally organized. Kant intended to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by emphasizing both the rational character and the receptive character of sensibility. Sensibility must be supplemented by understanding if experience is to be possible. Traditional metaphysics is wrong because it used the concepts of understanding without any corresponding evidence of sensibility. “Sensibility is the faculty of intuition: (a) sense, faculty of intuition in the present; (b) imagination, faculty of intuition ... log in or subscribe to read full text