I reconstruct the preliminary arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which provide the criteria of on which Kant’s central arguments will turn. Kant characterizes intuition as (i) object-giving, (ii) immediate, (iii) affection-dependent representation containing (iv) a matter of sensation that can be distinguished from (v) an a priori form. I explain Kant’s curiously teleological claim that all thought “aims at” intuition in terms of his “baseline conception” of intuition as providing nonintellectual grounds of truth: This is what it means for intuition to be object-giving. I then argue that Kant’s theory of discursive marks entails that object-giving representations must be immediate. Further, the intuition paired with a discursive intellect must be receptive (i.e. affection dependent). These claims can be justified via pure apperception. What cannot be is Kant’s characterization of intuition as sensible. But I show that Kant’s form/matter distinction and his subsequent arguments require only the receptivity of intuition, not its sensory embodiment. The chief doctrines of the Aesthetic can be justified via pure apperception, as part of a top-down approach to intuition.

I argue that the sensibility/understanding distinction announced at the end of Kant’s Introduction to the Critique can be justified via pure apperception. I first defend an account of the analytic/synthetic distinction, arguing that analytic judgments articulate intellectual grounds of truth. Synthetic judgments, then, are based on nonintellectual grounds of truth. This provides Kant’s “baseline conception” of receptive intuition as a capacity for representing nonintellectual grounds of truth. This is a “top-down” approach to intuition: a characterization of intuition not in terms of its intrinsic properties but in terms of a prior account of the intellect and its cognitive needs. I then argue that this version of the analytic/synthetic distinction follows from the idea that judgment must track the truth – an idea that is available to us via pure apperception. Thus, Kant’s baseline conception of intuition, as expressed in the sensibility/understanding distinction, can be justified via pure apperception.

I provide a Stufenleiter of human intuition that systematizes Kant’s discussions. Starting with intuition überhaupt, as object-giving representation, I distinguish spontaneous from receptive intuition. I divide receptive intuition into sensible and non-sensible; and divide sensible intuition into inner and outer sense, under which our human varieties of temporal and spatial intuition fall as instances (not species). This chapter offers detailed accounts of givenness and of cognitive spontaneity (the other differentia are addressed in Chapter 8). I argue that givenness, the fundamental criterion of intuition überhaupt, involves securing both (i) the existence of the object and (ii) thought’s cognitive access to it. One might worry that these functions could come apart. I address this worry by developing a novel interpretation of spontaneity and its opposite, receptivity. As applied to representations, I argue, these notions are fundamentally epistemic and explanatory. This is why the functions cannot come apart and why a representation that performs one function spontaneously (or, as the case may be, receptively) must also perform the other spontaneously (or receptively).

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.

Kierkegaard’s aesthete, named only as A, continually laments the lack of meaning in his life. He suffers through passions that flare up and quickly die away, leaving him in a melancholic state. His mode of being is on display in the Diapsalmata, the fragmentary writings at the start of Either/Or. In this chapter, we examine why he avoids becoming consistently engaged in the world and remains trapped within his alienated melancholia. We offer a general account of melancholy, arguing that melancholia is an existential condition that must be understood in terms of the metaphysics of possibility. We also provide a sympathetic interpretation of A’s melancholy, rather than placing blame upon him, because melancholia attunes us to certain aspects of the world and of human existence. The aesthetic life has epistemic, moral, and aesthetic worth on its own terms, so a person may legitimately decide to remain melancholic. This avoids compromising our possibilities, makes us receptive to the suffering of others, and may inspire creative activity such as writing poetical fragments.

The Introduction provides a basic account of Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant, and the major philosophical themes that feature in his interpretation. These themes include fundamental ontology, human finitude, receptivity, and time. The Introduction also introduces the main sources under consideration: Heidegger’s 1927–1928 lecture series on Kant, and his 1929 Kant book. Finally, an overview of the chapters in the book is provided.

We resume the above discussion about sense perception and violence and delve further into the campaign Lucretius wages against presumed subjectivity. This chapter is a combination of two previously published articles (“Ocular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura” and “Seminal Verse: Atomic Orality and Aurality in De Rerum Natura” ) both of which have undergone revision and expansion for the present volume. The weight of inquiry falls especially on sight and hearing, which are, perhaps not coincidentally, the primary modes of experiencing the poem or – to put it more in Lucretius’ parlance – the senses being assailed by the poem itself. Shown to be less than powerful in the womb in Chapter 2, here we find that Lucretius alters this uterine imagery to prove that men and their sense orifices are involuntary, womb-like repositories for nature’s inseminating forces.

The chapter takes us to the moment of biological conception and explores the question of male autonomy in embryonic fertilization and development. We will follow Lucretius’ lead into the reproductive organs of men and women to show how generative material supplied by female and male sexual partners both competes and cooperates at conception. What Lucretius reveals in forceful language and imagery is that men are impotent in the face of universal physics and that female reproductive assertiveness gives the lie to exclusive male dominion from the moment when genetic material from both parents first coheres in utero.

Tackles the two main issues of contention between Cassirer's and Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant. I first examine why Heidegger opposes his own ‘ontological reading’ of the first Critique to the ‘epistemological reading’ that he attributes to the Neo-Kantians. I clarify what this opposition entails and consider in what way it indeed applies to Cassirer (4.1). Next, I turn to Cassirer and Heidegger's more specific disagreement regarding the relevance of Kant's account of transcendental imagination. Remarkably, both thinkers not only value how this account attempts to undercut the artificial opposition between receptivity and spontaneity (4.2), but their agreement extends to the shared thesis that Kant ultimately did not succeed because he lacked a truly phenomenological method (4.3). Yet, Cassirer and Heidegger still radically part ways as soon as they evaluate why this (failed) attempt is so important: while Heidegger takes transcendental imagination as the ground of human reason’s finite nature, Cassirer concludes from the primacy of this faculty to the fundamentally spontaneous character of reason (4.4).