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.

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.