ENSAIO SOBRE A UNIDADE SINTÉTICA MERAMENTE SENSÍVEL

Abstract

I present the essay of my critique to the interpretation that the synthetic unity of intuition in Kant can only result from the effective participation of intellectual faculties. For this, I maintain that the objects of intuition are constructed not only by means of the understanding (lato sensu), but also by the simple imagination, by means of a synthetic unit of the multiple of the intuition given to the sense, without it being necessary the direction or conduction of discursive units, but respecting only autochthonous rules. Thus these objects of intuition contain a unity originated only from the sensibility (merely sensible synthetic unit), for they are produced only by the imagination, under the only condition of obtaining the disconnected manifold of sensible representations from the collaboration of the senses. The faculty of imagination is apt to produce these conceptually indeterminate objects of the empirical intuition called “appearances” [Erscheinungen], because it is a spontaneous sensible capacity with duplicity of character, impulses and aptitudes (Calabria: 2012, 115-167, 2015 and 2016). In addition to showing that appearances, while blind intuitions containing a subjective unity, nevertheless provide an objective reference to empirical intuitions (as mind modifications), I explain in what sense Kant considers appearances to be transformed into objects of experience called «phenomena» [Phaenomena], when they receive the intellectual unit from the application of conceptual representations.