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Is “space” a concept? Kant, Durkheim, and French Neo‐Kantianism
Author(s) -
Godlove Terry F.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1520-6696(199610)32:4<441::aid-jhbs7>3.0.co;2-t
Subject(s) - a priori and a posteriori , intuition , epistemology , representation (politics) , philosophy , space (punctuation) , sociology , linguistics , politics , law , political science
According to Kant, all humans share a basic form of spatial representation—space is an “a priori intuition.” Durkheim felt that Kant's a priori stance blocked the kind of empirical inquiry that would show human spatial representation to be, on the contrary, quite diverse. Durkheim's claim raises the issues in intellectual history and philosophy addressed in this paper. First, the paper traces Durkheim's reading of Kant through the nineteenth‐century French neo‐Kantians Renouvier and Hamelin. Second, it argues that Kant's and Durkheim's projects are not, after all, genuine competitors. The result is to reassert the sharp distinction between epistemological and sociological approaches to spatial representation that Durkheim and others tried to collapse. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.