I continue explicating my Stufenleiter by distinguishing receptivity from sensibility, which are often conflated in the literature. I argue that the preestablished harmony theories of Leibniz and Crusius, as well as the “hyperphysical influx” Kant ascribes to Plato, involve receptive but non-sensible modes of intuition. I identify significant and underappreciated puzzles afflicting Kant’s notion of sensible affection: Kant has no account of how material objects can affect an immaterial mind, nor any account of how an immaterial mind can sensibly affect itself. I conclude by observing that many of the distinctions I discuss, such as the receptivity/sensibility distinction, track different levels of abstraction and that this can have significant consequences for motivating interpretations. Emphasizing sensibility often motivates phenomenological interpretations (Parsons), whereas semantic or “logical” readings (Hintikka) typically emphasize receptivity. I illustrate the fruitfulness of this diagnosis by distinguishing three different conceptions of the singularity of intuition, each associated with a different level of abstraction: receptive, sensible, and human.

This chapter explores a significant thesis that emerges in Heidegger’s reading of Kant: the linear, unidirectional form of time that Kant outlines is dependent on another model of time – the human temporality comprising three interlaced temporal capacities. The chapter argues that developing this thesis represents the central philosophical payoff of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation; Heidegger goes to Kant to develop his own account of temporal idealism. Heidegger concurs with Kant that the form of time is relative to the human standpoint, but offers a deeper account of where that form of time comes from – i.e., how it derives from the very structure of the human being. While Being and Time attempts to trace the characteristics of linear time back to the human being’s temporality, Heidegger’s account of time in the Kant interpretation elaborates how temporality produces linear time. Specifically, Heidegger outlines the process of self-affection, in which the interaction between the human being’s three temporal capacities actualizes another model of time by interpreting the time that we ourselves are. This argumentative approach foregrounds a gap between the temporality of the human being and the interpretation of time upon which we arrive, suggesting that time could be otherwise interpreted.

Chapter 2, “Temporal Consciousness and Inner Perception”, offers an interpretation of inner perception as the perception of distinctively inner appearances by drawing on resources from the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic (mainly the A-Deduction) of the first Critique. The chapter develops an interactional model of perception with three constitutive aspects: (1) affection through outer sense, (2) synthesis of apprehension through the active faculties of the mind, viz. imagination and understanding, and (3) self-affection through inner sense. Each of these constitutive aspects is shown to define a formal and a material condition of perception. By carving out the notion of transcendental self-affection, i.e., the a priori determination of the form of inner sense through the understanding, the chapter derives the a priori temporal conditions of perception. Applying the general model to the inner case, inner perception is construed as empirical consciousness of inner appearances, based on empirical self-affection.