On an older dispute: Hegel, Pippin and the separability of concept and intuition in Kant

Abstract

In this chapter, Dennis Schulting is interested in how, following Hegel’s critique of Kant, recent Hegelians have read Kant’s claims in the Transcendental Deduction (TD) in particular. Hegelians such as Robert Pippin think that in TD Kant effectively compromises or wavers on the strict separability of concepts and intuitions that he stipulates at A51-2/B75-6. For if the argument of TD, in particular in its B-version, is that the categories are not only the necessary conditions under which I think objects, by virtue of applying concepts, but also the necessary conditions under which anything is first given in sensibility, the fixed separation between concepts and intuitions seems incompatible with the very aim and conclusion of TD. Schulting examines these charges by looking more closely at Pippin’s reading of the B-Deduction. Pippin believes the orthodox Kant cannot be retained, if we want to extract something of philosophical value from TD. He defends a Kantian conceptualism shorn of the remaining nonconceptualist tendencies, which are in his view antithetical to the spirit of Kant’s Critical revolution. Schulitng argues, by contrast, that we must retain the orthodox Kant, including its nonconceptualist tendencies, in order not to succumb to an intemperate conceptualism.