IS SPACE A CONCEPT - KANT, DURKHEIM, AND FRENCH NEO-KANTIANISM

According to Kant, all humans share a basic form of spatial representa tion-space is an ''a priori intuition.'' Durkheim felt that Kant's a p riori stance blocked the kind of empirical inquiry that would show hum an spatial representation to be, on the contrary, quite diverse. Durkh eim's claim raises the issues in intellectual history and philosophy a ddressed 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 spa tial representation that Durkheim and others tried to collapse. (C) 19 96 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.