scholarly journals Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: Critical Re-Examination, Elucidation and Corroboration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Westphal
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Transcendental Deduction

Immanuel Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction of the Categories’ addresses issues centrally debated today in philosophy and in cognitive sciences, especially in epistemology, and in theory of perception. Kant’s insights into these issues are clouded by pervasive misunderstandings of Kant’s ‘Deduction’ and its actual aims, scope, and argument. The present edition with its fresh and accurate translation and concise commentary aims to serve these contemporary debates as well as continuing intensive and extensive scholarship on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Two surprising results are that ‘Transcendental Deduction’ is valid and sound, and it holds independently of Kant’s transcendental idealism. This lucid volume is interesting and useful to students, yet sufficiently detailed to be informative to specialists.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Henning
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction

This brief chapter summarizes central findings regarding the role of parenthetical sentences in practical discourse. But it also provides historical context. It suggests that a precursor of parentheticalism may be found in Kant, especially in Kant’s views about the “I think,” especially as they are expressed in the B-Version of the “Transcendental Deduction” and the B-Version of the chapter on Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Das Recht in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-149
Author(s):  
Reinhard Brandt
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Introductory Note ◽  
Pure Intuition

AbstractRecent publications (Henrich, Seeberg) claim that Kant has been profoundly influenced by contemporary publications on juridical deductions. I try to show, that this cannot be right. The introductory note of the “Transcendental Deduction” (Critique of Pure Reason A 84) poses two questions: “quid facti?” and “quid juris?”. The first is answered by the demonstration of the possibility of relations between pure concepts and pure intuition und sensations, the second by the implicit refutation of David Hume. Kant and his interpreters sustain the possibility of using juridical concepts, that are neither related to real juridical facts nor are only metaphers, but have a special philosophical signification. But what should that be?

Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Karl Ameriks
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Critical System ◽  
Theoretical Philosophy

This chapter responds primarily to a recent criticism of Kant by Stephen Houlgate. Like many other recent Hegelian accounts, Houlgate’s severe critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy contends that, in contrast to Hegel, Kant’s Critical system, especially because of its doctrine of transcendental idealism, presupposes a subjectivist and therefore inadequate position. On the basis of a moderate interpretation of Kant’s idealism and his general Critical procedure, the chapter defends Kant from the charge of subjectivism, and also gives an account of how subjectivist interpretations in general can arise from a series of understandable misunderstandings of difficult passages in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves

Kant Yearbook ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Allais
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
Metaphysical Position ◽  
The Way

Abstract One of Kant’s central central claims in the Critique of Pure Reason is that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This claim has been regarded as problematic in a number of ways: whether Kant is entitled to assert both that there are things in themselves and that we cannot have knowledge of them, and, more generally, what Kant’s commitment to things in themselves amounts to. A number of commentators deny that Kant is committed to there actually being an aspect of reality which we cannot cognise; they argue that he is committed merely to the idea that we cannot avoid the concept of things as they are in themselves. I will argue in this paper that while transcendental idealism is partly an epistemological position, it is also partly a metaphysical position, and in specific, that Kant is committed to the claim that the things we cognise have, in addition to the way they appear to us, a nature that is independent of us, which we cannot cognise.

scholarly journals Darwinism as the Missing Link in Kant’s Critical Philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Igor K. Kalinin
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Physical Nature ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Entire System ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Logical Functions

I proceed from the hypothesis that the difficulties in Kant’s presentation of his plan and, accordingly, the implicit reason for the critical attitude to this plan on the part of many contemporary philosophers stem from the fact that he had no theoretical link at his disposal which would offer a more solid scientific grounding for his entire system. I believe that Darwinism is such a link which bolsters the central but ungrounded thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason on the existence of a priori synthetic judgments. The synthesis of Darwinism and critical philosophy dictates, however, a substantial restructuring of the latter since some of its key elements prove to be weak in the light of modern studies and need to be revised or even reversed. The first reversal explored in this article determines the origin of the categories which are now revealed not “from the top down” where Kant sought them, i. e. not in logical functions in accordance with metaphysical deduction and not in self-consciousness as transcendental deduction claims, but “from the bottom up” if one considers things in the evolutionary dimension, i. e. in the instincts. The second reversal shifts the freedom of will which Kant placed in the same ontological basket with things in themselves at “the top,” to another level of the pyramid of ontologies, by changing dualism to pluralism because dualism is too narrow to accommodate all the autonomous components of critical philosophy. Thus spirit and freedom find a new place separate from the sphere of physical nature; the category of adaptation explains how different ontologies can coexist; while the problem of two interpretations of transcendental idealism (two-world vs. two-aspect interpretation) finds a solution through their reconciliation.

Kant's Transcendental Deduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Laywine
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Human Thought

The Transcendental Deduction in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason tries to show that all human thought and knowledge depend on the categories of the understanding and that these categories can apply only to appearances. If it works as an argument, it implies that metaphysics as a science of non-sensible things is impossible. The author of this book argues, however, that the Transcendental Deduction reflects Kant’s long engagement with the branch of special metaphysics called ‘general cosmology’: the doctrine of a world as such. General cosmology was supposed to be a science of non-sensible things. That is how Kant treated it in his early metaphysical writings. But the author argues that Kant later adapted it for the purposes of the Transcendental Deduction. He extracted from it a purely formal characterization of a world, stripped of any commitment to non-sensible things, and repurposed it as a characterization of experience. The author argues that Kant’s formal cosmology of experience is at the heart of the Transcendental Deduction: it informs the aim of the Deduction and the details of its argument—even those that appear remote from anything cosmological.

Cartography and Autobiography

2020 ◽  
pp. 263-288
Author(s):  
Alison Laywine
Keyword(s):  
Special Problem ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Inner Sense ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Special Case

This chapter completes the examination, started in Chapter Four, of the second half of the Transcendental Deduction, as found in the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The focus of this chapter is §24 and §25. The special problem of these sections is empirical self-knowledge. The author argues that Kant treats self-knowledge as a special case of the cosmology of experience: the problem is how I situate myself in the empirical world. The solution to the problem is to build up in thought an understanding of the world by legislating universal laws to nature by means of the categories and to map my geographical and historical place in the world by means of the cartographic resources available to the productive imagination. The chapter has two parts. The first part is devoted to a paradox Kant claims to be associated with self-affection. It tries to understand his claim as a reflection on his own views in the mid-1770s about self-apprehension by inner sense and apperception. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the specialized cartography Kant takes to be involved in empirical self-knowledge and considers how Kant distinguishes between biography and autobiography.

scholarly journals Kant on the Transcendental Deduction of Space and Time: an Essay on the Philosophical Resources of the Transcendental Aesthetic

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Melissa McBay Merritt
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Modes Of Representation

Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has focused intensively on the transcendental deduction of the categories – the pivotal chapter of the book that governs our understanding of much that precedes it and just about all that follows it. One simple way to understand the systematic function of the Transcendental Deduction is to appreciate that it provides an account of how the ‘two stems of human knowledge’ (A15/B29) – sensibility and understanding – must relate to one another in the production of knowledge. On Kant's view, these capacities are distinguished by their radically different modes of representation: intuition and concept. Although sensibility and understanding are fundamentally distinct – they ‘cannot exchange their functions’ – they must nevertheless cooperate in the production of knowledge: ‘Only through their unification can cognition arise’ (A51/B75–6). The task of the Deduction is to show how the categories – concepts that stem from the ‘nature of the understanding’ alone – apply necessarily to objects that can only be given in experience, and represented as given through sensible intuition.

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