Representation in Kant

‘Representation’ (Vorstellung) is a pervasive and central notion in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Although recent scholarship has produced valuable accounts of Kant’s taxonomies of different types of representations and their interrelations, many authors continue to implicitly align Kant’s term Vorstellung with the narrower contemporary notion of a mental item with semantic content. This thesis argues that it is possible to interpret Kant’s views on mental representation along the lines of 20th-21st century theories, with the reservation that prior terminological and conceptual clarifications are required to determine whether we can interpret Kant as trying to think about the problem of mental representation as we now understand it. To this end, Kant’s use of the term Vorstellung is contextualised in relation to his post-Leibnizian predecessors, and at different stages of his philosophical development towards the Critical philosophy. I point out consistent misalignments between our narrower notion of representation and what Kant takes Vorstellung to mean – this is the negative part of the thesis. In the positive part, I draw on contemporary theories of mental representation to show that there are nonetheless parallels between types of Vorstellungen in Kant and aspects or elements of our narrower notion of representation. This enables a new way of accounting for Vorstellungen in Kant’s picture whose relationship to semantic content is controversial. I argue that sensations provide an information condition that is necessary but not sufficient to determine semantic content. Intuition, which is often viewed as independently representational in the literature, is interpreted as a mere format constraint on the Vorstellungen of cognition, to the effect that the information given by sensation must be rendered in a spatiotemporal medium. Finally, the schematised synthesis of intuition, on my interpretation, amounts to the idea that theoretical cognition has a temporally iconic representational format.