Abstract

Do Anglo-American Kant scholars typically relegate Kant’s claims about sensation, intuition, and perception to a provisional or precritical status and focus instead on the Transcendental Deduction, the second edition Refutation of Idealism, and the Analogies of Experience? Are the issues that concern these recent interpreters more appropriate to contemporary problems of meaning and reference in semantics rather than to what was of central concern to Kant? Are such approaches basically one-sided and anachronistic unless supplemented by a phenomenologically oriented interpretation? To all of these questions, Richard Aquila answers in the affirmative and attempts to correct these shortcomings in his Representational Mind—a work that is clearly informed by ideas from Brentano and, to a lesser extent, from Husserl and Heidegger. But lest this triggers an immediate disinterest or avoidance in the so-called Anglo-American analytic scholars, it should be pointed out that Aquila himself is well grounded in the analytic perspective, definitely does not concentrate on Kant’s relation to his phenomenological successors, and provides a phenomenological dimension to Kant’s theory of knowledge that meshes well with the orientation of his more analytically-minded contemporaries. As he says at the end of his Preface, “In any case, I hope to have contributed to the current tendency toward ‘dialogue’ between the two approaches.” His book succeeds remarkably well in this respect.