Enjoy the Lorne Maclachlan Lecture on Kant featuring Emily Carson, McGill University for a discussion on the roles of sensibility, imagination, images and construction and the challenges of these theories which Kant explicitly addresses. This lecture is part of the Colloquium Series by the Department of Philosophy.
Emily Carson will explore how Leibniz, in the New Essays, contrasts his own account of geometrical demonstration with those, like Locke’s, that appeal to “what images tell us”. This contrast underlies a traditional way of distinguishing rationalists like Leibniz and Wolff from empiricists like Locke. Not surprisingly, the story is not so straightforward. Emily begins by discussing Wolff, Mendelssohn and Lambert’s views on mathematical demonstration and the role therein for sensibility, imagination, images and/or construction. She argue that these figures are struggling to theorize common challenges, challenges that Kant eventually brings to the fore and explicitly addresses. Kant aims to show that his account of the nature of sensibility can explain the acknowledged roles for construction in geometrical demonstration.
