Cognition, Content, and the A Priori ─ A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge

In Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, Robert Hanna works out a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, he provides accounts of (i) intentionality and its contents, including non-conceptual content and conceptual content, (ii) sense perception and perceptual knowledge, including perceptual self-knowledge, (iii) the analytic-synthetic distinction, (iv) the nature of logic, and (v) a priori truth and knowledge in mathematics, logic, and philosophy. This book is specifically intended to reach out to two very different audiences: contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and knowledge on the one hand, and contemporary Kantian philosophers or Kant-scholars on the other. At the same time, it is also riding the crest of a wave of exciting and even revolutionary emerging new trends and new work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with a special concentration on the philosophy of perception. What is revolutionary in this new wave are its strong emphases on action, on cognitive phenomenology, on disjunctivist direct realism, on embodiment, and on sense perception as a primitive and proto-rational capacity for cognizing the world.Cognition, Content, and the A Priori makes a fundamental contribution to this philosophical revolution by giving it a specifically contemporary Kantian twist, and by pushing these new lines of investigation radically further.

Robert Hanna

Robert Hanna is an independent philosopher, and Co-Director of the Contemporary Kantian Philosophy Project. He received his PhD from Yale University USA in 1989, and has held research or teaching positions at the University of Cambridge UK, the University of Colorado at Boulder USA, the University of Luxembourg LU, PUC-PR Brazil, Yale, and York University CA. He has authored or co-authored five books:Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (OUP, 2001), Kant, Science, and Human Nature (OUP, 2006),Rationality and Logic (MIT, 2006), Embodied Minds in Action (co-authored with Michelle Maiese; OUP, 2009), andIn Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto (co-authored with A. Chapman, A. Ellis, T. Hildebrand, and H. Pickford; Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). He is currently working on a four-book series on the nature of human rationality, entitledThe Rational Human Condition.