The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

epetition of this question within the doctrine of self-positing are articulations of the
power and functions of the faculties of both spontaneity and receptivity. The reciprocal
relationship between these two levels of the subject, which was known from Kant‘s
previous work to bring forth the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition, constitutes the
core of the doctrine of self-positing. There is, however, a difference from the first KrV;
since the doctrine of self-positing provides also a much more robust elucidation of their
relation to the sphere of the empirical, which is to say, as these capacities participate in
the constitution and conditioned nature of a finite subject, its world domain, and, most
importantly, the way in which this world opens to a subject that both inhabits and aims to
know it through the construction of experience. As Kant tarries with this topic, he
expounds upon the role of sensibility as the receptive faculty that functions, in the
broadest sense, as the source of a field of determinability from which a theoretical
account of a transition between the a priori to the a posteriori cognitive fields becomes
possible. This transition is exhibited in so far as sensibility is thought as both an a priori
function of the mind as well as a virtual sphere where the subject configures itself as
embodied; a configuration that takes place by means of the subject's self-positing, which
is to say through the repetition of the spontaneous activity of thought. This heightened
role of sensibility as the faculty of receptivity and its reciprocal relationship to the
spontaneity of thought that characterizes the doctrine of self-positing can be found
encapsulated in Kant‘s idea of an ―act of receptivity.‖ 2 This idea is the topic of this
dissertation.
The work done here in order to arrive at a philosophical understanding of this ―act
2 Ak: 22:32.
2