Cognition, Content, and the A Priori

Abstract

AbstractThis book develops a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, it provides accounts of (i) intentionality and its contents, including non-conceptual content and conceptual content, (ii) sense perception and perceptual knowledge, including perceptual self-knowledge, (iii) the analytic-synthetic distinction, (iv) the nature of logic, and (v) a priori truth and knowledge in mathematics, logic, and philosophy. This book is specifically intended to reach out to two very different audiences: contemporary Analytic philosophers of mind and knowledge, on the one hand, and contemporary Kantian philosophers or Kant-scholars, on the other. At the same time, it is also riding the crest of a wave of extremely exciting and even revolutionary emerging new trends and new work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with a special concentration on the philosophy of perception. What is revolutionary in this new wave are its strong emphases on action, on cognitive phenomenology, on disjunctivist direct realism, on embodiment, and on sense perception as a primitive proto-rational capacity for cognizing the world. The book makes a fundamental contribution to this philosophical revolution by giving it a specifically contemporary Kantian twist, and by pushing these new lines of investigation radically further.