‘Ordered and Placed in a Certain Form’: Kant on the Spatiality of Sensation

Abstract

AbstractKant claims repeatedly that experience involves sensations being ‘ordered and placed’ in space. This paper considers what this surprising claim could possibly mean. After presenting the relevant textual evidence and rejecting two candidate interpretations of it, I defend a qualia or ‘mental paint’ interpretation, according to which experience involves a direct, conscious ‘acquaintance’ with sensations arrayed in a ‘phenomenal space.’ This interpretation allows us to take literally many of Kant's claims about sensation: that it is the matter of both intuition and appearance, that we are conscious of sensation in perception, and that sensible qualities like color are sensations.