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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2014
Kant's monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) begins with his account of perception. Look around you. An experience is the result. You seem to see a chair and a person, say – your spouse at rest. A welcome sight. A gift from the world, in more than one sense. Yet not all aspects of the experience – even perhaps of its content – are coming to you from the world, according to Kant. What else is involved?
1 The word ‘intuition’ (as translated into English) for Kant is not denoting quite what it does for us. It means something close to what our word ‘representation’ means in this setting.
2 I never had this name available for designating these experiences, until I read Oliver Sacks on the phenomenon. See his Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, revised and expanded (London: Picador, 2008)Google Scholar, 221 n. 2.
3 Usually, I am very tired or I have been crouching, say. (But no, my blood pressure is normal, and I am a lifelong teetotaller.) This has been happening since my teenage years, when I first had migraine headaches and some epileptic seizures.
4 I do this non-deductively and programmatically. I have no definitive proof. The personal experiences are suggestive and illustrative. For me, they suggest and illustrate a Kantian moral.
5 My thanks to Markos Valaris and Melissa Merritt for their careful comments on a draft of this paper.