Kant consistently uses ‘discursive’ to mean cognition through concepts – so consistently that it can seem this is the traditional use of the term. But it is not. I show that Meier and Wolff employ the (Latin) cognates of ‘discursive’ to refer to reasoning and inference. Indeed, Wolff follows Aquinas in using ‘discursus’ to refer to the third of the tres operationes mentis, around which Scholastic logic was organized: simplex apprehensio, iudicium,and ratiocinium (seu discursus), i.e. apprehension of simple notions, judgment, and reasoning (or discursion). Kant’s use thus shifts the reference of ‘discursive’ from one extreme in the tres operationes mentisto the other: from inferring to representation through concepts. The implication of this shift, I argue, is that conceptual representation, for Kant, is intrinsically inferential. Accordingly, it is neither an apprehensio (an immediate representation) nor simplex (of something simple). In place of the Scholastics’ noetic apprehension of simple notions, Kant introduces his own trio of acts: comparison, reflection, and abstraction. This revision implies both (i) that no representation that is universal can also be simple, because universality is gained through comparison and reflection, which are intrinsically judgmental and inferential, and whose contents are thus complex (manifold, plural), and (ii) that the act of entertaining a concept, as a universal representation, cannot therefore be an immediate apprehension – it cannot be an intuiting (intuitio, Anschauung) nor a noesis, an act ofnous. I conclude by showing that this sense of ‘discursive’ sheds light on some otherwise obscure passages in Kant’s arguments about the non-discursive character of spatiotemporal representation.
