This book is a comprehensive exposition of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in both editions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

I defend an interpretation of the first Critique’s category of totality based on Kant’s analysis of totality in the third Critique’s Analytic of the mathematical sublime. I show, firstly, that in the latter Kant delineates the category of totality — however general it may be — in relation to the essentially singular standpoint of the subject. Despite the fact that sublime and categorial totality have a significantly different scope and function, they do share such a singular baseline. Secondly, I argue (...) that Kant’s note (in the first Critique’s metaphysical deduction) that deriving the category of totality requires a special act of the understanding can be seen as a ‘mark’ of that singular baseline. This way, my aesthetical ‘detour’ has the potential of revealing how the subjective aspects of object-constitution might be accounted for in the very system of the categories (of quantity) itself. (shrink)

James Van Cleve has argued that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the categories shows, at most, that we must apply the categories to experience. And this falls short of Kant’s aim, which is to show that they must so apply. In this discussion I argue that once we have noted the differences between the first and second editions of the Deduction, this objection is less telling. But Van Cleve’s objection can help illuminate the structure of the B (...) Deduction, and it suggests an interesting reason why the rewriting might have been thought necessary. (shrink)

In focusing on the systematic deduction of the categories from a principle, Schulting takes up anew the controversial project of the eminent German Kant scholar Klaus Reich, whose monograph “The Completeness of Kant's Table of Judgments” made the case that the logical functions of judgement can all be derived from the objective unity of apperception and can be shown to link up with one another systematically. -/- Common opinion among Kantians today has it that Kant did not mean (...) to derive the functions of judgement, and accordingly the categories, from the principle of apperception. Schulting challenges this standard view and aims to resuscitate the main motivation behind Reich’s project. He argues, in agreement with Reich’s main thesis about the derivability of the functions of judgement, that Kant indeed does mean to derive, in full a priori fashion, the categories from the principle of apperception. -/- Schulting also shows that, given the general assumptions of the Critical philosophy, Kant's derivation is successful and that absent an account of the derivation of the categories from apperception, the B-Deduction cannot really be understood. -/- New edition. First published 2012 as „Kant’s Deduction and Apperception. Explaining the Categories" (Palgrave Macmillan). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to exhibit some important features of the two versions of the deduction. In the first edition, Kant emphasizes the role of imagination as an autonomous faculty; in the second, On the contrary, Imagination, Though keeping its synthetic function, Is subordinated to the understanding. This reversal in the role of imagination is bound up to a paradoxical conception of the object which pervades the two editions of the "critique". The deduction should be conceived (...) as a way out of the paradox, Each edition favoring one alternative against the other. The role of the subject is correlative of the way the object is conceived: this article shows how german idealism radicalized kant's position in the first edition, And positivism, The second version, Though both were led to depart from kant's general requirement that knowledge was a result of the equilibrium of concepts and intuitions. (shrink)

In this article, the author proposes to reconstruct Kant's "transcendental deduction" without in any way making use of the results of the so-called "metaphysical" one. His suggestion is that what Kant baptizes "pure concepts" or "categories" are in fact not "concepts" at all, strictly speaking, but rather the very forms of judgment from which these "concepts" were supposed to have been derived in the "metaphysical deduction". The task of the "transcendental" deduction is, then, to show that (...) such forms of judgment can legitimately be applied to empirical contents: to demonstrate, in other words, the possibility of empirical knowledge. (shrink)

In the wake of the massive criticism of Kant’s deduction of the categories in the first Critique, Fichte starts providing what he takes an improved version of such a deduction to be. This article aims at investigating the transformation he thereby introduces into the Kantian thought. I will do so mainly with respect to the deduction’s architectonical dimension, i.e. by investigating the role of the deduction for the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole. Concretely, I will defend (...) the following theses: (1) By identifying the deduction of the categories and the metaphysical system, Fichte moves away both from Kant’s conception of a system and from that of a deduction. (2) It is the unique character of Fichte’s conception of a first principle of a system that allows for an identification between system and deduction. (shrink)

In this article some problems associated with Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories will be examined. Kant wrote that the deduction was one of the most difficult and arduous investigations ever undertaken in metaphysics. It is the deduction that must establish the lawfulness of claims to knowledge on the part of pure reason and determine the very possibility of metaphysics.

Thomas C. Vinci argues that Kant's Deductions demonstrate Kant's idealist doctrines and have the structure of an inference to the best explanation for correlated domains. With the Deduction of the Categories the correlated domains are intellectual conditions and non-geometrical laws of the empirical world. With the Deduction of the Concepts of Space, the correlated domains are the geometry of pure objects of intuition and the geometry of empirical objects.

Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories justifies their apriority, i.e. that their contents originate in the understanding itself, while the Transcendental Deduction justifies their objectivity, both in that they purport to represent objects of experience and that they do so successfully. The apriority of the categories, as explained in terms of acts of synthesis required for having sensible intuitions of objects, is justified by establishing their generic identity with logical functions of judgment, i.e. acts of judgment (...) required for referring concepts to objects. The objective purport of the categories is justified by establishing that sensible intuitions fall under them. To finally justify that the categories represent successfully, i.e. that the objects of our intuitions fall under them, it is established that the representations of space and time do, namely by showing that the features addressed in their Metaphysical Expositions, too, are to be explained in terms of acts of synthesis. (shrink)

Those familiar with the Critique of Pure Reason will not at all be surprised that Thomas C. Vinci has found it fitting to dedicate an entire book to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, a chapter of the CPR that is as important to Kant’s argument for Transcendental Idealism as it is difficult to decipher. The purpose of that section is to establish the objective validity of the categories—to show, that is, that the pure concepts of the (...) understanding apply to all objects of human experience. While the general goal of the TD may be easy enough to state, the argument strategy that Kant uses to establish the objective validity of the categories is hardly easy to understand.Vinci focuses on the.. (shrink)

Fichte argues that the conclusion of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is correct yet lacks a crucial premise, given Kant’s admission that the metaphysical deduction locates an arbitrary origin for the categories. Fichte provides the missing premise by employing a new method: a genetic deduction of the categories from a first principle. Since Fichte claims to articulate the same view as Kant in a different, it is crucial to grasp genetic deduction in (...) relation to the sorts of deduction that Kant offers. I propose to interpret genetic deduction as the simultaneous fulfillment of two tasks: answering the question quid facti by deriving the categories from the I and answering the question quid juris by establishing our entitlement to the categories as conditions of experience. While the second task represents Fichte’s agreement with Kant’s transcendental deduction, the first reflects his correction of Kant’s metaphysical deduction. (shrink)

Like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we now have both an A- and a substantially revised B-edition of Henry Allison's commentary to and defence of that work: Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense . Unlike Kant's Critique, however, Allison's first edition is unlikely to persist as an occasional rival to the second, since reviewers rightly consider the second to have superseded the landmark scholarship of the first. Nevertheless, before Allison's first edition is entirely supplanted, I would like to save (...) a neglected insight from its treatment of the B-deduction that is not retained in the second edition. (shrink)

By taking into account some texts published between the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that have been neglected by most of those who have dealt with the deduction of the categories, I argue that the core of the deduction is to be identified as the ‘almost single inference from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general’, which Kant adumbrates in the Metaphysical Foundations in order to ‘make up for the (...) deficiency’ of the A-deduction. Whereas the first step of the B-deduction is an attempt to show that the manifold of an intuition belongs to the ‘necessary unity of self-consciousness’ by means of the synthesis of the understanding, the second step has the task of showing that the very same synthesis is responsible for the spatio-temporal unity of the manifold. Thus, Kant's ‘answer to Hume’ is that no spatio-temporal objects of experience at all are merely ‘given’, independently of the conceptual activities of the understanding. Against the established view I substantiate the claim that with this ‘almost single inference’ of the second proof step the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience consequently vanished from Kant's thinking. (shrink)

A priori reflection, common sense and intuition have proved unreliable sources of information about the world outside of us. So the justification for a theory of the categories must derive from the empirical support of the scientific theories whose descriptions it unifies and clarifies. We don’t have reliable information about the de re modal profiles of external things either because the overwhelming proportion of our knowledge of the external world is theoretical—knowledge by description rather than knowledge by acquaintance. This (...) undermines the traditional idea that to be an object of category C is to be an object with such- and-such characteristic possibilities of combination. But this is no loss because de re modal thought lacks utility for creatures like us. (shrink)

Dieter Henrich’s reconstruction of the transcendental deduction in "Identität und Objektivität" has been criticised (probably unfairly) by Guyer and others for assuming that we have a priori Cartesian certainty about our own continuing existence through time. In his later article "The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction", Henrich addresses this criticism and proposes a new, again entirely original argument for a reconstruction. I attempt to elucidate this argument with reference to Evans’s theory of the Generality Constraint (...) and a remark of Strawson’s in Individuals. Its logical form of a sentence-operator requires that the "I think" be capable of accompanying every thought that we can form. Henrich seems to rely on this point, claiming in addition that we must be aware of this property of the "I think". I object that we cannot assume everyone to be capable of doing the philosophy of her own situation. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose to resolve the controversy over the derivation of the categories of quantity by spelling out three claims: (1) the three quantitative functions/forms of judgment (universal-particular-singular), qua synthetic categories of quantity (unity-plurality-totality), lawfully direct the determination of sensible manifolds as singular totalities, which (2) brings to light a specifically categorial type of judgmental activity, distinguishable from but presupposed by empirical judgments. This calls for (3) pairing the category of totality with the singular judgment and (...) the category of unity with the universal judgment (‘Order B’), rather than pairing the singular judgment with unity and the universal judgment with totality (‘Order A’). At stake in this controversy is our understanding of the categories’ normativity, their scope, and the division of labor between intuitions and categories in individuating objects. (shrink)

The deduction of the categories lies undoubtedly at the very heart of Kant's theoretical philosophy and, for this reason, it is one of items in the philosophical canon that is greatly discussed and least agreed upon. In the modern and contemporary Western philosophical tradition as well as in Kant’s literature, the loci classici for its consideration are the 1781 and 1787 editions of the Critique of pure reason. In this paper, I aim at presenting and discussing an argument (...) that Kant advances in the Prolegomena and which is virtually ignored in the approach of the deduction of the categories. At first, an inquiry into the distinction between analytic and synthetic methods is carried out. After that, the difference between judgments of perception and judgments of experience is taken into account. Finally, the Prolegomena’s argument for the categories is brought into discussion. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 110 Heft: 1 Seiten: 166-171.

This paper deals with a foundational aspect of Integrated Information Theory of consciousness: the nature of the relation between the axioms of phenomenology and the postulates of cause-effect power. There has been a lack of clarity in the literature regarding this crucial issue, for which IIT has received much criticism of its axiomatic method and basic tenets. The present contribution elucidates the problem by means of a categorial analysis of the theory’s foundations. Its main results are that: IIT has a (...) set of nine fundamental concepts of reason, called categories, which constitute its categorial lexicon and through which it formulates a system of principles incorporating the axioms, the postulates, and the central identity; and the connection between the axioms and postulates is grounded by their common root in this categorial lexicon, the categories of which find their justification by means of a phenomenological and transcendental deduction. Some further results are the unique origin of axioms and postulates in the categories; the distinction between conceptual and formalized postulates; a clarification of the uniqueness problem of categorial lexica in general; and an IIT account of objectivity by explicating how the physical is defined by means of categories. All of this is put to use against various criticism targeting IIT’s theoretical core. If successful, the proposed interpretation illuminates a central issue in the contemporary study of consciousness and contributes to an environment of mutual understanding between defenders and critics of the theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concepts, Judgments, and Unity in Kant's Metaphysical Deduction of the Relational Categories CHARLES NUSSBAUM 1. INTRODUCTION TO ANY ATTENTIVEREADERof the section of the Critique of Pure Reason' known as the "Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories" (A67/B92-A83/B to9), one paragraph in that section stands out particularly by virtue of its special importance for Kant's developing argument: The same function Which gives unity to the various representations (...) in ajudgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in general.... (CPR A79/B loS) The importance of this paragraph is, however, more than equaled by its difficulties, which center on the question of how the function which operates by means of analytical unity can be the same as one that operates by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in general. Put shortly, the problem is this. If the functions are really the same, then how do we distinguish at all between analytic and synthetic operations? But if they are different, then how can these forms of judgment serve as a clue for the discovery of the categories? ' Immanuel Kant, Critiqueof Pure Reason, trans. Norman KempSmith (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1963).Hereafter CPR. [89] 9~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 The results of this dilemma which can be observed in the literature are not surprising: commentators tend to grasp one horn or the other. They either emphasize the difference between analysis and synthesis, and reject or dilute the claims as to sameness of function; or they take seriously Kant's argument concerning sameness of functions, and try to minimize the difference between analysis and synthesis. The major twentieth-century representant of the former approach is Kemp Smith," and of the latter, Paton. 3 This latter approach has found a formidable contemporary champion in the person of Henry Allison. By Allison's own admission,4 however, his position on this controversial topic was suggested (in part) by arguments first put forward over fifty years ago by Klaus Reich in a most remarkable book entitled Die Volls~ndigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel, 5 a book, by the way, also greatly admired by Paton. 6 In the first section of this paper I will try to show that Reich's arguments are rather more subtle than Allison apparently takes them to be, and that Reich is one commentator who attempts to go between the horns of the dilemma described above, and who essays an interpretation of our crucial paragraph that unifies its seemingly divergent tendencies. In the second section of the paper I will introduce some interpretive elements of my own. 2. Let us begin by reacquainting ourselves with Kant's notion of analytical unity, one aspect of this debate which is not particularly controversial and is largely agreed upon by all parties. For Kant, analytical unity is the sort of unity achieved by all general concepts (conceptus communes) insofar as they abstract from all differences that subsist between the objects under them, or the lower concepts subordinated to them. 7 A general concept unifies these objects or concepts by means of a common mark or set of marks. Thus Kant's example at CPR A69/B94 of the unification of bodies under the concepts 'body' and 'divisible' is a perfectly representative instance of unification via analytical unity, as the function upon which such concepts "rest." Let us note that the " Norman KempSmith,A CommentarytoKant's "Cr/t~rueofPureReason"(NewYork:HumanitiesPress, 196~). 3 H.J. Paton, Kant's MetaphysicofExperience, 2 vols.(London:George Allenand Unwin,Ltd., 1936). 4 Henry Allison,Kant's TranscendentalIdealum (NewHaven:YaleUniversityPress, 1983), 144 n. 3o. Hereafter KTI. 5 KlausReich,Die Vollst~ndigkeitderKantischenUrteilstafel,3rd. ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986). Hereafter VKU. 6 Paton, Kant's Metaphysic, 1:302. Kant, we should note, does not makethis important logicaldistinctionbetweensubordination... (shrink)