Justifying Kant’s Transcendental Deduction; Objective Knowledge and the Unity of Self-Consciousness (original) (raw)
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Self-understanding in Kant's transcendental deduction
1995
I argue that § §15-20 of the B-Deduction contain two independent arguments for the applicability of a priori concepts, the first an argument from above, the second an argument from below. The core of the first argument is §16's explanation of our consciousness of subject-identity across self-attributions, while the focus of the second is § 18's account of universality and necessity in our experience. I conclude that the B-Deduction comprises powerful strategies for establishing its intended conclusion, and that some assistance from empirical psychology might well have produced a completely successful argument.
The Shortest Way: Kant’s Rewriting of the Transcendental Deduction
Inquiry, 2018
This work examines Kant's remarkable decision to rewrite the core argument of the first Critique, the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. I identify a two-part structure common to both versions: first establishing an essential role for the categories in unifying sensible intuitions; and then addressing a worry about how the connection between our faculties asserted in the first part is possible. I employ this structure to show how Kant rewrote the argument, focusing on Kant's response to the concerns raised in an early review by Johann Schultz. Schultz's dissatisfaction with the original Deduction lies in its second part, and Kant's subsequent revisions are focused on providing a better answer to this how-possible question. The new Deduction offers a more direct and convincing account of how our faculties work together to make experience possible.
In this critical review of Robert Hanna's ingenious book (2006), I aim to support Hanna " s main insightful reading of Kant, namely what he calls " a priori truth with a human face," without appealing to Kant's divide between a priori and a posteriori and analytic and synthetic truths. My suggestion is that transcendental propositions are necessary neither in the usual epistemological sense that analytic propositions are, let alone in the metaphysical sense that some empirical propositions are. Instead, they are necessary in the theoretical domain in the weak alternative sense that they make possible the empirical recognition of appearances as an object as an indispensable condition of our self-consciousness experience, and they are a priori in the practical domain in the sense that their truth is vital for our self-comprehension as human beings.
Unveiling Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
MA Thesis, 2011
Kant attempts to establish a correlation between the unity of self-consciousness and the experience of an objectively valid world in the “Transcendental Deduction” of the Critique of Pure Reason. For this purpose, he plots a sophisticated proof which contains sub-arguments and several aspects. This study focuses in the extended analysis of the central argument exposed in the first half of the “Transcendental Deduction” of the second edition. Some of the argumentation strategies adopted by Kant and the interpretations of the prominent commentators corresponding to these approaches are compared. For the ease of the analysis, the content of the argument is disassembled into main and side components. Detailed explanations are provided for each of these components. Although they receive relatively less attention of scholars, in this study the side features are considered to have significant contributions to the overall comprehension of the deduction. I suggest that concerning them in the relevant interpretations will help to get a better insight of the text. Some additional supportive accounts are also supplied for Henry Allison’s ‘reciprocity’ reading of the deduction. ÖZET Salt Aklın Eleştirisi’nin merkezinde yer alan “Transandantal Dedüksiyon” bölümünde Kant, kendi kendinin bilincinin birliği ile deneyimin nesnelliği arasında geçerli bir ilişki kurmaya çalışmaktadır. Bu amaçla geliştirdiği sav, birçok bileşeni bir arada ele alması nedeniyle oldukça karmaşık bir yapıdadır ve farklı şekillerde yorumlanmaktadır. Bu tez çalışması, ikinci basımdaki dedüksiyonun ilk bölümünün irdelenmesini kapsamaktadır. Söz konusu savı oluşturan ana ve yan öğeler ayrıntılı olarak incelenmiş ve felsefe yazınında göreceli olarak daha az dikkat çeken yan öğelerin Kant’ın dedüksiyonunun doğru olarak anlaşılmasına sağladıkları katkılar değerlendirilmiştir. Ayrıca Henry Allison’ın ‘karşılıklılık’ yorumunu destekleyecek çıkarımlar ve metinsel bulgular ortaya konulmuştur.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2010
In the transcendental deduction, the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seeks to secure the objective validity of our basic categories of thought. He distinguishes objective and subjective sides of this argument. The latter side, the subjective deduction, is normally understood as an investigation of our cognitive faculties. It is identified with Kant’s account of a threefold synthesis involved in our cognition of objects of experience, and it is said to precede and ground Kant’s proof of the validity of the categories in the objective deduction. I challenge this standard reading of the subjective deduction, arguing, first, that there is little textual evidence for it, and, second, that it encourages a problematic conception of how the deduction works. In its place, I present a new reading of the subjective deduction. Rather than being a broad investigation of our cognitive faculties, it should be seen as addressing a specific worry that arises in the course of the objective deduction. The latter establishes the need for a necessary connection between our capacities for thinking and being given objects, but Kant acknowledges that his readers might struggle to comprehend how these seemingly independent capacities are coordinated. Even worse, they might well believe that in asserting this necessary connection, Kant’s position amounts to an implausible subjective idealism. The subjective deduction ismeant to allay these concerns by showing that they rest on a misunderstanding of the relation between these faculties. This new reading of the subjective deduction offers a better fit with Kant’s text. It also has broader implications, for it reveals the more philosophically plausible account of our relation to the world as thinkers that Kant is defending – an account that is largely obscured by the standard reading of the subjective deduction.
How do we read Kant: an Empiricist and a Transcendental Reading of Kant’s Theory of Experience
Philosophia, 2017
The issue of the nature of cognitive experience has been a subject of lively debate in recent works on epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. During this debate, the relevance of Kant to contemporary theories of cognition has been rediscovered. However, participants in this debate disagree whether Kant was a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist, with regard to the character of intuitions. The central point of controversy concerns whether or not Kant’s sensible intuitions involve understanding and have a conceptual content. In this paper, I show that, despite their disagreements, both sides share a number of common presuppositions, which have determined a biased framework for the reading of Kant. My principal aim in this article is to reconcile the case for conceptualism with those interpretations which argue that intentionality and conceptuality can be separated. To achieve it, I present my own reconstruction of Kant’s theory of cognition, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction, and offer a new interpretation of Kantian conceptualism.
Kant's Subjective Deduction: A Reappraisal
European Journal of Philosophy , 2018
In the A-preface of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant kindly warns his readers to pay special attention to the chapter on the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” Looking to mitigate the reader’s effort, Kant goes on to explain the chapter’s methodology, suggesting that the inquiry will have “two sides.” One side deals with the “objective validity” of the pure categories of the understanding; he calls this the “objective deduction.” The other deals with the powers of cognition on which the understanding rests; he calls this the “subjective deduction.” Having gone to such great lengths to outline his method ahead of time, it comes as no small surprise that the actual chapter offers no clear indication of where the two deductions are located. In this essay, I address this puzzle. On the way, I engage with both traditional and recent interpretations of the subjective deduction, arguing that they fail—in one way or another—to satisfy the criteria that Kant develops in the preface.