284 Perception in Kant, McDowell, and Burge Christian Helmut Wenzel Taipei, Taiwan | wenzelchristian@yahoo.com Abstract Kant sometimes compares human beings with animals and angels and grants human beings a middle position. But contrary to what one might expect, his transcendental philosophy does not apply well to animals or angels. The question of whether we share perception with animals has no good answer in his system that has to be taken as a single piece and does not allow for introducing steps of empirical, real developments. Differently from Kant, McDowell does compare human beings with animals, but he is not a transcendental philosopher and his attempts to find support in Kant are problematic. Although McDowell says that concepts go "all the way out" and Kant says the categories go "all the way down," which sounds similar, Kant talks of a pri- ori categories, not empirical concepts. Burge is definitely not a transcendental philosopher like Kant. Up front he strongly relies on empirical studies, especially animal perception. Nevertheless, his quest into mental content introduces first-person perspec- tives that have a metaphysical flavor, and this makes - at least to me - comparisons with Kant tempting again. The Problem in Kant In the act of perceiving we are doing something. We are not just passive. Our eyes move, and so do our hands when we touch, feel, and handle an object. Seeing is al- ways seeing-as, hearing is always hearing-as, and they depend on our use of language and our communicating with each other. But is seeing therefore always concep- tual? How much do concepts play into perception? Are they always involved? The answers to these questions will of course depend on what we mean by “concepts.” Kant has a theory of concepts. For him imagination (Ein- bildungskraft) plays a mediating role between what he calls “intuition” (Anschauung) and “concept” (Begriff). But how exactly does this work? How free is imagination from concepts, and how much is it guided by them? Kant was certainly aware of the fact that perception is active. Thus he wrote in a footnote of the first Critique (1781): “Psy- chologists have hitherto failed to realise that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is due partly to the fact that that faculty has been limited to repro- duction, partly to the belief that the senses not only supply impressions but also combine them so as to generate im- ages of objects. For that purpose something more than the mere receptivity of impressions is undoubtedly required, namely, a function for the synthesis of them” (A 120). Thus for Kant, receptivity alone does not do it. Synthesis is re- quired. But what kind of synthesis would that be? Kant famously said that intuitions without concepts are blind. Now perception is usually not blind, which is no wonder, because perception is more than intuition. Per- ception (Wahrnehmung) is by definition “appearance with consciousness” (Erscheinung mit Bewusstsein, A 120). It involves consciousness. We may be willing to accept that appearance without consciousness – appearance that is not even potentially conscious – may be called “blind,” and “nothing to us,” as Kant also says. But what are we buying into when we say that consciousness is involved? What are we buying into when we understand this within the Kantian framework? Will this lead us all the way to Kant’s notion of “apperception” with its “original synthetic unity”? Will it lead us to accept the deduction of the categories? The categories are of course not just any concepts. They are a priori concepts, and even as such of a special sort. They are not empirical, such as the concept of a chair, or the concept of a bird. When we see something as some- thing, for instance as a chair, the empirical concept of a chair will be involved. But what can we say about the Kant- ian a priori categories? When we do not know what a chairs is, we will see it as something or other, or we will at least try to do so. In this way I think the categories will be involved already, in seeing it as a physical object and this, one can argue, involves the categories. But what happens when a bird or infants sees the chair? Will the categories be involved in such cases? That would seem odd. Or are they involved to some kind of degree, or only some of them? I think that what Kant says about perception is meant for human perception and does not easily apply to percep- tions that birds or infants have; the Kantian notion of per- ception does not work this way. It is more restrictive and more demanding. The Critique of Pure Reason talks about perception that rational beings like us have, not about animal perception. Kant at places goes up to angels, but he avoids going down to non-human animals or infants. The reason for this is two-fold, I think. On the one hand he is interested in the higher faculties, such as reason and the understanding. He wants to establish the understanding on firm grounds (in the Analytic), and at the same time he wants to limit it (in the Dialectic) to avoid confusion. This endeavor reaches far, too far for animals to matter. On the other hand, and this is the second reason I have in mind, Kant is interested in a priori justification (Geltung), not in the empirical development (Genesis), be it development in the agent (how experience develops), or of the agent (how an agent evolves or develops). He considers rational be- ings, healthy and grown-up human beings, as we might say. But many passages in the first Critique do read like some kind of empirical description of how experience and cognition develop in time and in agents. This is particularly visible in the Deduction of the categories of the first edi- tion, the so-called “A-Deduction.” Kant there describes a development that starts with appearance, becomes per- ception, and ends up being cognition. He talks of a “three- fold synthesis,” which comes in stages and steps: appre- hension, reproduction, and recognition. It then seems that concepts, and also the categories, enter only in the last step: recognition. Reading things in this way, one could try to make connections between the first two steps on the one hand, apprehension and reproduction, and perception in animals or infants, or dreams we have, on the other. But I think this will not fit the first Critique, because this book is not meant to be read as an account of some kind of em- pirical genesis, as Kant explicitly says. I think the first steps, contrary to what the readers might think on first The Philosophy of Perception and Observation. Papers of the 40th International Wittgenstein Symposium edited by Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau and Friedrich Stadler, Kirchberg am Wechsel 2017, pp. 284-287. , vol. 25,