Developing a Kantian-Inspired Dualist Account of Human Cognition and its Potential for a Critical Discussion of Naturalism

A growing interest in Kantian philosophy within contemporary scholarship has recently intensified collaborations between the European tradition of Kant-Research and contemporary systematic philosophy. Kantian philosophers try to develop their views in contemporary terms and contemporary philosophers make use of Kantian ideas. This has lead to the new and dynamic branch of Contemporary Kantian Philosophy. With developing a Kantian-inspired approach to cognition I do contribute not only to Kantian Philosophy, but even more so to contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Perception and Knowledge. In particular, I will first relate to discussions on the nature of the conceptual content of representations, and second to disputes about the existence and nature of non-conceptual content in perceptions. Both topics are intensively discussed in recent contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology. In relation to Kant's famous 'two sources' view of cognition, understanding and sensibility, I will pursue and develop a Kantian-inspired cognitive dualist account of human knowledge. The main focus will lie in developing a detailed theory of the a priori constituents of human cognition: The categorical normativity involved in conceptual content, and the necessary constituents involved in non-conceptual content. By ‘categorical normativity’ I understand a cognitive subject's conceptual awareness that her representations are appropriate to the object, while by the ‘necessary constituents involved in non-conceptual content’ I mean the spatiotemporal structure of our perception that grounds mathematical (especially geometrical and arithmetical) cognition. Having this twofold focus, I intend to provide a non-naturalistic account of the sense of normativity and necessity involved in human cognition, emphasizing how each are grounded in the human capacity to a priori generate conceptual and non-conceptual content. Naturalist approaches encounter fundamental problems in accounting for this. They reduce these capacities to the natural world and -- as I intend to show -- fall prey to the fallacy Kant calls “generatio aequivoca” (CPR, B167). This fallacy entails that an explanatory reference to contingent and empirical facts, the explanans, is in a certain way equivocal to the elements of necessity and normativity in conceptual and non-conceptual content, the explanandum, like the necessity and validity of mathematical cognition that goes beyond the contingency invoked in empirical explanations. Drawing on this equivocality issue, I intend to work out how Naturalist accounts of the human mind present an important threat to adequately understand human cognition. Naturalist approaches in the philosophy of mind are mostly forms of cognitive monism, usually Empiricist in orientation (Millikan, Dretske, Prinz, and Machery) -- but also sometimes Rationalist (Fodor). The Kantian-inspired dualist account of human cognition will form the basis for my assessment of the equivocality claim on two different levels: on the intellectual, conceptual and personal level, and on the sensible, non-conceptual and sub-personal level. A critical discussion of Naturalism that includes non-naturalizable elements on the non-conceptual level has, as to my knowledge, not been undertaken so far. Thus, my particular contribution to contemporary research will consist in developing a non-naturalistic cognitive dualism in order to critically discuss Naturalist approaches to the mind on both levels: the conceptual and the non-conceptual. This will furthermore contribute to the advancement of a reconsideration of the Naturalist bias that is prevailing in contemporary philosophy.