Final answer:
Immanuel Kant viewed time as an a priori form of intuition necessary for organizing sensations into coherent experiences, incorporating 'gedankenlose Anschauung' as an immediate form of knowledge. The mind applies innate categories to synthesize experiences into a structured whole, blending rationalist and empiricist views in his transcendental idealism.
Step-by-step explanation:
Immanuel Kant's perspective on the nature of time and its organization in human cognition, as detailed in his seminal work Critique of Pure Reason, holds that time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. Kant believed that our understanding of time is not derived from experience because experience itself is temporal, and thus, time must be a condition of our sensibility.
According to Kant, objects can only be apprehended in space and time, which are forms of our sensibility, and therefore the mind must actively organize the non-temporal manifold of sensation to synthesize temporal experience.
Kant introduces the concept of 'gedankenlose Anschauung', which means intuition without thought, to describe how our mind can organize sensations into a meaningful experience before any conceptual thinking occurs. This intuition is integral to his cognitive framework, as it allows for immediate knowledge of objects as they appear to us, prior to the application of categories of understanding. In essence, Kant combines the rationalist belief in innate knowledge with the empiricist view that knowledge comes from experience.
Lastly, Kant's concept of synthesis refers to how the mind combines the manifold of sensations into a coherent experience. He posits that concepts like causation, substance, space, and time are not derived from experience but are instead inherent categories of the mind that shape our experience into a non-contingent whole. Without these a priori concepts and categories, empirical concepts and judgments would not be possible.