3 - Intuitive Knowledge and De Re Thought

Summary

Kant's Intuitions as a Variant of Contemporay De Re Thought

This text aims to explore the exegetical hypothesis that the Kantian conception of empirical intuition can be interpreted as a variant—obviously a variant avant la lettre—of the contemporary theory of de re thoughts.

An elementary and minimal presentation of this theory will suffice for this purpose: de re thoughts are object-dependent thoughts, thoughts whose individuation derives not from conceptual conditions to be satisfied by the properties of their objects, but rather from the immediate relations of the subject of these thoughts to the objects of which they are thoughts. This is also to say that these thoughts are intrinsic and constitutively relational, perception being the paradigmatic illustration of them. This idea is clearly presented by Kent Bach:

When we perceive something, we can think about it in a fundamentally different way than if we thought of it merely by description. To think of something by description is just to think of whatever happens to have the properties expressed by the description. But to perceive something is to be in a real relation to it, to be in a position to think of that object in particular, no matter what its properties. While attending to it, somehow … we can think of it as “that,” not merely, under some individual concept, as “the F.” Our thoughts about it are not DESCRIPTIVE but DE RE. Thoughts about objects of perception make up the basic … kind of de re thought.