Upcoming Events For Fall 2026:
Thomas Pendlebury
University of Chicago
CLHIPP 303,
Nov 6, 2026, 3:30pm
The Real Undistorted
John McDowell has argued that Kant’s doctrine of sensibility, according to which sensible representations have a form not wholly grounded in the form of thinking, spoils his account of empirical objectivity. This is because, for Kant, the form of thinking is what alone constitutes a representation as objective, so that any a priori feature of our empirical cognition additional to that form must have a distortive effect on our representation of reality. Professor Pendlebury argues that McDowell relies on an excessively rationalistic interpretation of Kant’s association of intellectual form with objectivity which Kant himself would reject, one which assumes that we have a positive conception of this association in abstraction from the form of our sensible representations. If Kant is right that we have no positive conception of theoretical objectivity independent of our forms of sensibility, then there is no positively intelligible measure of genuine objectivity of which sense-dependent human cognition can be said to fall short. Pendlebury suggests that this conclusion is an important index of the depth of Kant’s rejection of a kind of intellectualism entrenched in the philosophical tradition to which he belongs and his concomitant embrace of a thoroughly sensualistic conception of theoretical knowledge.
Contact: Brandon Waldon (BWALDON@mailbox.sc.edu)