Conflicting Conceptions of Construction in Kant’s Philosophy of Geometry

摘要

This paper is intended as a contribution to the longstanding debate about howrnto understand Kant’s appeal to pure intuition in his philosophical account ofrngeometry. It proceeds by focusing on a notion that has been at the center of thisrndebate, namely, the “construction” or “exhibition” of a concept in intuition. Irnclaim that not only does Kant appeal to this notion in two different ways-inrnsupport of both an epistemological and a semantic thesis, each based in hisrnbroader philosophical project-but also that the demands placed on this notionrnby these appeals are in conflict. The tension between the epistemological andrnsemantic appeals to construction-in-intuition can be clearly seen in geometricalrnproofs that proceed by reductio ad absurdum. I conclude by considering thernprospects for resolving this tension in a manner consistent with Kant’s broaderrnphilosophical ambitions.