Kant on the Reflecting Power of Judgment and Nonconceptual Content

In recent years, Kant has been seen as a reference point by non-conceptual content theorists for his notion of intuition (§§ 1-2). The aim of present work is exploring several complementary issues intertwined with the notion of non-conceptual content: of these, the first concerns the presence of a few epistemic features articulated according to the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (§ 3). This work intends to dismiss the possibility that the intuition is provided with an autonomous function of de re knowledge. To this end, an exploration of certain epistemological points emerging from the Critique of the Power of Judgment (KU) will be carried out in the conviction that these make up a suitable context to verify the presence of an autonomous, epistemically non-conceptual content in the transcendental system (§§ 4-6): it is here, in fact, that Kant discusses those cases where the intuition is given without bringing into play the conceptual dimension. As will be said, in this frame of reference such a content cannot subsist without any intellectual legacy.