Talk (Work in Progress): Michael Cuffaro (MCMP)

Title:

Kant on Pure Intuition, Inner Sense, Self-Affection, and Time, and Gödel on Kant

Abstract:

In his various remarks on what he called "mathematical intuition", the philosopher-mathematician Kurt Gödel often suggested that there is an analogy between it and our perception of material objects, to the bewilderment, or at any rate the dissatisfaction, of many of his later commentators. Gödel also often emphasised the extent to which he was influenced by (even when he did not agree with) the ideas of Immanuel Kant, and his engagement and effort to better understand Kant's thought continued throughout his life. "But now, if the misunderstood Kant has already led to so much that is interesting in philosophy," he wrote in the closing sentence of an unpublished manuscript on the foundations of mathematics and philosophy in (roughly) 1961, "... how much more can we expect from Kant understood correctly?".

My talk will focus on Kant's doctrine of inner sense, i.e., our sense, literally, of the way that we are affected by our own activity, and what according to Kant is its characteristic form, i.e., the so-called pure intuition of time. Kant's doctrine is widely considered to be one of the most obscure and difficult parts of his philosophy. In comparison with what Kant calls outer sense, and its characteristic form: space, it has received relatively little attention within Kant scholarship. As I will argue in my talk, however, it bears a critically important relationship to Kant's philosophy of (exact) natural science, broadly understood, and it helps to focus the objections that those, including Gödel, had to what they understood to be the Kantian programme. Finally, I will argue that Gödel is right: there is indeed an analogy between perception, in Kant's sense, and mathematical intuition in Gödel's sense, though the viability of Gödel's conception of the latter is an independent question.