essay evolution
Space is essentially that which is imagined. Constituted by a patterning of imagery. The imagination is continually active in ordinary perceiving and organizing these perceptions into a space-making pattern. This is true of physical space.
Immanuel Kant's most original contribution to philosophy is his "Copernican Revolution," that, as he puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception. The imagination is the sufficient cause for every mental activity.
It is Kant's productive imagination which synthesizes into concrete the manifold of sensory apprehension and acts of perceiving or comprehending. Without this imaginative grasp, he realized, there would be no coherent sense experience.
The imagination is the cause for every mental activity.
The first theory is that the fundamental activity of the mind, called "synthesis," is an activity of thought that applies certain concepts to a previously given perceptual datum from experience.
Thus, Kant still says, as late as page 91 of the first edition ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’,
"But since intuition [Anschauung] stands in no need whatsoever of the functions of thought, appearances [Erscheinungen] would none the less present objects to our intuition".
Space is essentially that which is imagined. Constituted by a patterning of imagery. The imagination is continually active in ordinary perceiving and organizing these perceptions into a space-making pattern. This is true of physical space.
Immanuel Kant's most original contribution to philosophy is his "Copernican Revolution," that, as he puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception. The imagination is the sufficient cause for every mental activity.
It is Kant's productive imagination which synthesizes into concrete the manifold of sensory apprehension and acts of perceiving or comprehending. Without this imaginative grasp, he realized, there would be no coherent sense experience.
The imagination is the cause for every mental activity.
The first theory is that the fundamental activity of the mind, called "synthesis," is an activity of thought that applies certain concepts to a previously given perceptual datum from experience.
Thus, Kant still says, as late as page 91 of the first edition ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’,
"But since intuition [Anschauung] stands in no need whatsoever of the functions of thought, appearances [Erscheinungen] would none the less present objects to our intuition".
posted by liz at
2:24 PM
