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The muteness of intuitions

I was invited to speak in a Hegel-McDowell event next year. I was wondering about McDowell's account of what the senses deliver. I'm going to present a prehension-based account of the interplay between sensibility and conceptual capacities. This is the abstract I sent.

A. C. Ewing has debunked the connection between what he labels epistemological idealism and the internal nature of all relations. To be sure, his target is the argument that purports to infer antirealism from the ontological thesis that all relations are internal - and not a much weaker version that has been recently considered by Schaffer and others, namely that there must be at least one internal relation between any two or more concrete items. In any case, the thrust of his debunking is to open the landscape for a realism that posits internal relations as central and spanning to the ones between knowledge and its object. Now, the issue of what senses deliver can be considered from the point of view of the nature of relations. A realist and response-dependence account of how senses respond to their objects could be grounded on the intrinsically common conceptual character of both relata. McDowell suggested that sensible intuitions, rather than blind without concepts as Kant claimed, are mute when deprived of a conceptual voice. The ontological nature of this common character of senses and their objects - and the muteness that result from its absence - is the main topic of this work. Placing the deliverances of the sense in the broader context of the nature of relations enable us to see what could be gained by different accounts of how an internal relation holds. In particular, I will explore what would follow from conceiving relations as Whiteheadian prehensions and taking subjective forms as the kernel of a strong version of process realism.

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