Is ''space'' a concept? Kant, Durkheim, and French neo-Kantianism

According to Kant, all humans share a basic form of spatial representation-space is an ''a priori intuition.'' Durkheim felt that Kant's a priori stance blocked the kind of empirical inquiry that would show human spatial representation to be, on the contrary, quite diverse. Durkheim's claim raises the issues in intellectual history and philosophy addressed 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 spatial representation that Durkheim and others tried to collapse. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.