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This chapter identifies ‘speculative’ elements Hegel claims to discover in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, elements he believes Kant himself failed to appreciate. That is, Hegel discovers resources in the Transcendental Deduction for overcoming the heterogeneity of concept and intuition. In his view, the idea of identity is, for example, implicit in Kant’s conception of the faculty of the original synthetic unity of apperception. This chapter provides further evidence that the identity Hegel claims to discover in the Transcendental Deduction is achieved neither by a reduction of concepts to intuitions, nor by a reduction of intuitions to concepts. The lesson Hegel believes we should ultimately derive from the Transcendental Deduction is that we need a new and non-Kantian account of the nature and origin of conceptual form.

In this chapter the background materials from the Empiricists, the Rationalists, and Kant’s earlier work, and the interpretations of the structure of the transcendental deduction and of the crucial notion of ‘synthesis’ are brought together in an account of the argument that the ‘unity of apperception’ is a necessary condition for rational cognition. The chapter explains in more detail what Kant understands by ‘rational cognition’ and it clarifies his various formulations of the ‘principle of apperception.’ It also shows how the theory of apperception fits into the deduction of the legitimacy of the categories and it considers the relations between transcendental and empirical apperception.

Kant’s theory of the cognitive subject emerges in the course of the transcendental deduction—the argument for the legitimacy of the categories. This chapter answers some basic questions about the deduction: What is the nature of the argument? What are its premises and conclusions? It also suggests a way of understanding Kant’s arresting claim that cognition contains ‘a priori’ elements that arise in cognition through the activities of the mind.

This chapter addresses and revises a foundational feature of Kant's epistemology, namely the Transcendental Deduction. It shows how Kant's argument attempts to prove that the objective unification of a sensible manifold (achieved through the categories) and the objective unity of self-consciousness (or, as Kant sometimes terms it, the ‘pure’ or ‘original unity’ of ‘apperception’) are reciprocally dependent. One cannot have the one without the other. Kant's arguments on these lines (in the revised ‘B’-version of the Critique of Pure Reason) are analyzed critically. His basic position is then reconstructed in a more viable form. This involves three stages that make use of ideas from Gareth Evans and Shaun Gallagher. Special attention is paid to the role of the categories and productive imagination in the ontogenesis of experience.

Presents the original version of a regressive reading of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories on the basis of a detailed analysis of the B edition version and a critique of influential non-regressive interpretations by Wolff, Strawson, and Bennett. It stresses difficulties in using the deduction directly to meet traditional empiricist concerns about skepticism, and it also argues that the concluding stages of Kant’s argument are not easily separated from substantive aspects of his notions of space and time as ideal forms. This essay is influenced by the early work of Dieter Henrich, and it discusses how his stress on the ‘two part’ structure of the deduction bears on important ways in which Kant’s argument is closely related to the form and content of the Transcendental Aesthetic as well.

This chapter provides a novel account of Kant's idea of the transcendental unity of appreciation and the role it performs in creating the illusion of mental substance. It differentiates Transcendental Deduction from Metaphysical Deduction. It also explains three paralogisms and how they influenced Nietzsche. This chapter discusses how Kant's thoughts decisively influenced Nietzsche's own account of selfhood as synthesis and his critique of metaphysics.

This chapter is influenced by the work of Gerold Prauss, and it consists largely in an overview of interpretations of Kant’s transcendental deduction and transcendental idealism. It distinguishes a wide variety of non-regressive interpretations of the deduction, and indicates some of their limitations. More positively, it explains how Prauss’ highly original discussion of Kant’s notion of appearance in experience helps with understanding details of the complex Critical conception of judgements of perception. The survey of work on transcendental idealism gives special attention to the early Kant scholarship of Prauss and Henry E. Allison, but it does not endorse their preference for a relatively non-metaphysical version of Kant’s doctrine.

This chapter introduces Kant’s theory of categories and corresponding principles. It explains and evaluates Kant’s attempt to derive his categories from forms of judgment. It also discusses in detail the principles that do not depend on the Transcendental Deduction–namely, the Axioms of Intuition, the Anticipations of Perception, the Postulates of Empirical Thought–and introduces those that do depend on the Transcendental Deduction–namely, the Analogies of Experience.

This essay contains a “friendly” critique of Béatrice Longuenesse's interpretation of the transcendental deduction in her Kant and the Capacity to Judge. The critique is friendly because it acknowledges the many virtues of this important book, particularly her emphasis on the significance of the capacity to judge [Urteilskraft] for the argument of the first Critique. Nevertheless, it maintains that she neither provides an adequate account of the role of the categories in the two parts of the deduction nor explains how these two parts are supposed to provide a single proof of the categories as Kant claims.

This chapter deals with the objective side of Immanuel Kant's epistemological project. As many commentators have recognised, Kant's hopes for the conclusiveness of the ‘Transcendental Deduction’ turned out to be rather premature. Kant claims that the categories apply to all perception, to the possibility of experience and therefore to all objects of experience. The chapter's account of the structure of Kant's extended legitimation of the categories owes much to Gerd Buchdahl's reading, in which every element of the ‘Analytic’ has a part to play. However, its reading brings out elements essential to the relation between Kant's epistemology and aesthetics, not to be found in Buchdahl or in the accounts given by others who also resist the temptation to assume that the full deduction of the categories is supplied in the ‘Transcendental Deduction’. The chapter explains how the principles of the understanding are not merely an application of the categories, but rather a further and aesthetically charged articulation that is necessary for the legitimation of the latter.

Argues, first, that there is a common ground in a methodological sense in the similarity of structure in Kant’s three Critiques. Also contends that central to Kant’s metaphysics and argumentative strategy is the assumption that there is an ontological common ground uniting subjects and objects, and that this is consistent with the regressive form of Kant’s transcendental deductions and his doctrine of transcendental idealism. In addition, argues that Kant’s philosophy as a whole seeks to show how there can be a common ground of agreement between the truths of common sense, philosophy, modern science, and rational morality. While providing an overview of the book, the Introduction also discusses the special interpretative difficulties of Kant’s Critical philosophy.

This chapter begins a two-chapter examination of the second half of the B-Deduction. This chapter has a special focus on §26. It has three parts. The first argues that Kant completes the Deduction in §26 with a cosmology of experience. It advances this argument in part by reading §26 in light of §36 of the Prolegomena. The second part examines the role and significance of image-making and the productive imagination for the cosmology of experience. It argues that, for Kant, they make possible cartography of the sensible world and that, without such cartography, no cosmology of experience and hence no thinking as such is possible. The third part of the chapter completes the examination of §26 by considering the role of universal laws of nature in a cosmology of experience and hence thinking as such. It argues that Kant’s treatment of universal laws and image-making in §26 tries to make good on his reflections in the Duisburg Nachlaß on the ‘ekthesis’ in a proof of classical geometry.

Knowledge as opposed to intuition is only possible if we can unify and thus identify what Immanuel Kant provisionally called the object in the initial paragraphs of the Critique of Pure Reason. This chapter explores the other side of Kant's dualism and argues that it is best understood as reflective form. It also contends that, on closer examination, dualism requires a plural iteration of the operations of the mind as the synthesis of affectivity, and that conceptualisation requires a third term, imagination. The combination of these different elements of experience counts as synthesis. Kant's faculty talk allows for reflection on a complex model of mind in which only the combination of distinct orientations gives rise to the structure or form of experience. Within his epistemology, Kant principally distinguishes sensibility from understanding. This chapter also looks at Kant's account of determining judgement in the two editions of the ‘Transcendental Deduction’. Finally, it claims that the synthetic activity arising from a combination of a plurality of faculties is examined directly, not merely presupposed, in Kant's account of aesthetic judgement.