Immanuel KantLife · Work · Legacy

← Glossary

Sensibility

The receptive faculty of cognition: the capacity to be affected by objects and to receive intuitions — shaped by space and time.

Sensibility, in Kant, is receptivity: only through it are objects given to us at all. It stands opposite the spontaneity of the understanding — receiving and ordering are two different achievements which yield knowledge only together.

The sense impressions themselves are a posteriori; but the forms in which we receive them — space and time — lie ready a priori. Only fitted into these forms do sensations become intuition and thereby a source of knowledge.

Where it appears

Source: Wikipedia: Sensibility