ABSTRACT
In a second edition footnote to the Critique of Pure Reason (B160n) Kant notoriously claims that space is not only a form of intuition, but itself a formal intuition. This note has become a focal point of the recent debate between the conceptualist and the non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant. In this chapter, Nan defends a non-standard version of the conceptualist reading. The terms “conceptualism” and “non-conceptualism” should be replaced with “intellectualism” and “sensibilism”, so that interpreters are less likely to conflate Kant’s distinction between intuition and concept with the distinction between non-conceptual and conceptual content widely made by contemporary philosophers of mind. Against the majority of recent interpreters, Nan argues that by “formal intuition” Kant means intuition of a geometrical figure; such intuition therefore necessarily involves geometrical concepts, though not the pure concepts of understanding or categories. Nan thus refers to this new version of conceptualism as “conceptualist sensibilism”.
