This paper reconstructs and defends Kant’s argument for the transcendental status of reason’s principles of the systematic unity of nature in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. On the present account, these principles neither contain mere methodological recommendations for conducting scientific inquiry nor do they have the normative force of categorical imperatives—two extant interpretations of Kant’s discussion of reason in the Appendix. Instead, they are regulative yet transcendental principles restricted to theoretical cognition. The principles of the systematic unity of nature count as transcendental in virtue of their role as conditions of the inferential articulation of empirical concepts.

Charles Travis has developed a distinction between “the historical” (the sensible world) and “the conceptual” (thoughts and concepts), which underlies his influential contributions to the philosophy of language and perception. The distinction is based on the observation that there are, for any thought, indefinitely many different circumstances that would render it true. The generality of thoughts and concepts contrasts with the particularity of the sensible world. I challenge the assumption that what exhibits such generality cannot belong to the sensible world. I also defend a version of the claim that perception involves the exercise of conceptual capacities.

This article advances a new account of Kant’s views on conceptualism. On the one hand, I argue that Kant was a nonconceptualist. On the other hand, my approach accommodates many motivations underlying the conceptualist reading of his work: for example, it is fully compatible with the success of the Transcendental Deduction. I motivate my view by providing a new analysis of both Kant’s theory of perception and of the role of categorical synthesis: I look in particular at the categories of quantity. Locating my interpretation in relation to recent research by Allais, Ginsborg, Tolley and others, I argue that it offers an attractive compromise on this important theoretical and exegetical issue.

Lucy Allais’s Manifest Reality presents a systematic discussion of the role that Kant assigns to concepts in making knowledge of objects possible. In this paper, I ascribe to Allais a version of non-conceptualism, according to which knowledge is a ‘hybrid’ or loose unity of concept and intuition; concept relates to intuition as form relates to matter in an artefact. I will show how this view has trouble accommodating the distinction between knowledge and accidentally true belief, and how it leads to objectionable forms of idealism.

This rejoinder responds to criticisms by Jan Klabbers and Ino Augsberg of ‘The New Legal Realist Approach to International Law’ (Leiden Journal of International Law, Volume 28:2, 2015). The New Legal Realism brings together empirical and pragmatic perspectives in order to build theory regarding how law obtains meaning, is practised, and changes over time. In contrast with conceptualists, such as Augsberg, legal realists do not accept the priority of concepts over facts, but rather stress the interaction of concepts with experience in shaping law's meaning and practice. Klabbers, as a legal positivist, questions the value of the turn to empirical work and asks whether it is a fad. This rejoinder contends that the New Legal Realism has deep jurisprudential roots in Europe and the United States, constituting a third stream of jurisprudence involving the development of sociolegal theory, in complement with, but not opposed to, analytic and normative theory.

I give an argument against nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s First Critique, according to which one can enjoy a Kantian intuition without possessing any concepts, and present an alternative reading. The argument is that nonconceptualist readings are forced to construe the Transcendental Deduction in one of three ways, none of which is acceptable: The Deduction is seen either (i) as inconsistent with the Transcendental Aesthetic; or (ii) as addressing a question of fact rather than a question of legitimacy; or (iii) as articulating a position that Kant himself criticizes as a form of scepticism. Consideration of the third alternative, in particular, shows that a more promising construal of the Deduction must be based on a different interpretation of Kant’s claim that intuitions and concepts constitute two distinct kinds of representation than is assumed by proponents of nonconceptualist readings. I present such an interpretation and outline the alternative reading of the Deduction that results.

There has been considerable recent debate about whether Kant's account of intuitions implies that their content is conceptual. This debate, however, has failed to make significant progress because of the absence of discussion, let alone consensus, as to the meaning of ‘content’ in this context. Here I try to move things forward by focusing on the kind of content associated with Frege's notion of ‘sense (Sinn)’, understood as a mode of presentation of some object or property. I argue, first, that Kant takes intuitions to have a content in this sense, and, secondly, that Kant clearly takes the content of intuitions, so understood, to be distinct in kind from that possessed by concepts. I then show how my account can respond to the most serious objections to previous non-conceptualist interpretations.