Title:
Kant on Pure Intuition, Inner Sense, Self-Affection, and Time, and Gödel on Kant
Abstract:
Kant's doctrine of inner sense, i.e., our sense, literally, of ourselves, and what according to Kant is its characteristic form: time, bears a critically important relationship to Kant's philosophy of (exact) natural science, broadly understood, and in my talk I will argue, in addition, that it helps to focus the objections that thinkers, such as Gödel, had to what they understood to be the Kantian programme. I will begin by explaining how, according to Kant, space and time are the pure forms of outer and inner sense, respectively, which respectively correspond to our capacity to represent objects as being outside ourselves, and our capacity to represent anything at all. In the latter case, I will explain that attending to the synthesis of what is given to us in outer sensibility invariably produces, for Kant, an effect upon our inner sense, and a corresponding determinate intuition that we relate, in time, to the other determinate intuitions that we have of ourselves and of our own inner state. In this way we perceive ourselves through time, where perception, importantly, involves a kind of empirical consciousness of one's own inner state in relation to some outer appearance. I will then explain that Kant's transcendental schemata correspond to transcendental time determinations, and how the transcendental schemata underlie Kant's synthetic a priori principles, which in turn provide the ground for his metaphysical foundations of natural science. Finally, I relate the discussion to Gödel's ideas on mathematical intuition and to Gödel's objections to and his understanding of Kant's programme. I will explain that intuition, for both Kant and Gödel, is defined in terms of a rule-governed activity, and that Gödel was right, in this sense, to say that there is an analogy between sense perception and mathematical intuition, if the former is understood (as it probably was for Gödel) in the Kantian sense. For Kant, however, intuition is necessarily sensible insofar as the images produced by the power of our imagination are of necessity sensible images, even in the case where what is being exhibited is a temporal interval, and even though time itself cannot be directly perceived. There is no analogous requirement of visualisability, in the case of mathematical intuition, for Gödel.