Was Kant a Nativist?

Abstract

It has long been supposed that took space and time to be innately originating forms imposed by the mind on the data given experience. According to Bertrand Russell, Kant maintained that virtue of our mental constitution, we deal with the raw material of sense-impressions by means of certain 'categories' and by arranging it space and time. Both the categories and the space-time arrangement are supplied by us.' Before Russell this opinion was sustained a very explicit fashion by Hermann von Helmholtz: [Kant] claimed that, not only the qualities of experience, but also space and time are determined by the nature of our faculty of intuition.... [A]ccording to him, space is carried to objects by our eyes.2 And more recently it has been advanced by, among others, Patricia Kitcher. Kant had a serious argument that the spatial properties of as we perceive them, derive from our perceptual apparatus and not from the properties of objects affecting sensation.3 I will challenge this tradition this paper. While the evidence that took space and time to be some sense innate is incontrovertablehe explicitly says that space is in the subject merely as its formal constitution for being affected by objects, to name just one instance4-his critics and commentators have failed to grasp the precise sense of this nativism. In what follows I will describe the proper sense of Kant's nativism and argue that he was not a nativist any of the senses his commentators and critics have supposed. The nativism/empiricism dichotomy is a notoriously slippery one