Organization: Andrew Stephenson
Abstract
Kant consistently uses ‘discursive’ to mean cognition through concepts – so consistently that it can seem this is the traditional use of the term. But it is not. I show that Meier and Wolff employ the (Latin) cognates of ‘discursive’ to refer to reasoning and inference. Indeed, Wolff follows Aquinas in using ‘discursus’ to refer to the third of the tres operationes mentis, around which Scholastic logic was organized: simplex apprehensio, iudicium,and ratiocinium (seu discursus), i.e. apprehension of simple notions, judgment, and reasoning (or discursion). (There remain open questions about when and how this sense of 'discursus’ took hold in the Latin tradition, especially in medieval translations from Greek and Arabic.) Kant’s use thus shifts the reference of ‘discursive’ from one extreme in the tres operationes mentisto the other: from inferring to representation through concepts. The implication of this shift, I argue, is that conceptual representation, for Kant, is intrinsically inferential. Accordingly, it is neither an apprehensio (an immediate representation) nor simplex (of something simple). In place of the Scholastics’ noetic apprehension of simple notions, Kant introduces his own trio of acts: comparison, reflection, and abstraction. This revision implies both (i) that no representation that is universal can also be simple, because universality is gained through comparison and reflection, which are intrinsically judgmental and inferential, and whose contents are thus complex (manifold, plural), and (ii) that the act of entertaining a concept, as a universal representation, cannot therefore be an immediate apprehension – it cannot be an intuiting (intuitio, Anschauung) nor a noesis, an act ofnous. I conclude by showing that this sense of ‘discursive’ sheds light on some otherwise obscure passages in Kant’s arguments about the non-discursive character of spatiotemporal representation.
Kurzbiografie
Daniel Smyth is Associate Professor in Philosophy and German Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Intuition in Kant: The Boundlessness of Sense (Cambridge University Press 2024), a major new study of Kant’s theory of intuition. The book offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant’s account across its different forms—divine, sensible, and human—while addressing the striking tension between the finitude of sense perception and Kant’s claim that intuition can represent the infinite. Smyth develops an original “apperceptive” interpretation on which intuition functions as the indispensable cognitive partner of a discursive intellect. Ranging across philosophical methodology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of mathematics, the work has been widely praised for its innovation, rigour, and depth. It was awarded the 2025 Henry Allison Senior Scholar Book Prize by the North American Kant Society and the 2025 Book Award from the American Philosophical Association.