Anatomy of the Invisible: Kant and the Early Modern Medicine of Phantasms— Between Force and Form

Abstract

Anatomy of the Invisible: Kant and the Early Modern Medicine of Phantasms—Between Force and Form examines the early modern medico-philosophical history of the phantasm, or mental image, and Kant’s reception of it. As a product of the sensory imagination, the phantasm once played a central role in epistemology, mediating between sensation and knowledge. Kant denies it this transcendental function, however, and relocates its study to empirical psychology and physiology. Yet in that medical context, he continues to investigate the topic in marginal writings. This dissertation shows that Kant’s peripheral references to disparate medical theories form a sustained analysis of the phantasm and its pathologies. Reading these neglected marginal texts alongside the physicians Kant himself consulted, Anatomy of the Invisible reconstructs a coherent medical archive and argues for its philosophical significance. It shows that Kantian philosophy incorporates diagnostic and therapeutic models from medicine, as well as anatomical and physiological accounts of how sensory force takes phantasmatic form. The dissertation traces this influence from Kant’s medical sources to the margins of his critical system and into its interstices—at the origin of affect, in the genesis of concepts, on its practical horizon, to its theological limits, and within its linguistic medium. Wherever the transcendental system must open onto embodied life, the phantasm emerges as its sensory ground, requiring a medicine of the imagination.