Abstract
This paper presents an elucidation of Kant’s notion of judgment, which clearly is a central challenge to the understanding of the Critic of Pure Reason, as well as of the Transcendental Idealism. In contrast to contemporary interpretation, but taking it as starting point, the following theses will be endorsed here: i) the synthesis of judgment expresses a conceptual relation understood as subordination in traditional Aristotelian logical scheme; ii) the logical form of judgment does not comprise intuitions (or singular representations); iii) the relation to intuition is not a judgment concern; iv) the response to the question about the ‘x’ that grounds the conceptual relation in judgments must be sought in transcendental aspects: 1) on construction in pure form of intuition, 2) in experience and 3) in the requirements to experience, respectively to mathematical, empirical, and philosophical judgments. The overall purpose is to build up an understanding of judgment that supports a latter assessment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy.
Highlights
A correct interpretation of the central proposal of the critical program, the enquiry concerning the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, obviously depends on a correct interpretation of judgment, which in turn depends on determining how predication, and the logical subordination of the subject to the predicate, may be conceived
As these things are not quite clear in the Critique of Pure Reason2, it seems productive to search for more elements in the logical and historical contexts
The contemporary interpretation tends to fluctuate between two approaches to judgment, one supported by a conception derived from analytic philosophy, and the other from Port-Royal Logic
Summary
The second reason is that this interpretation of subordination marks a difference among the ranges of valid inferences: in classical Aristotelian logic, the immediate predicative judgments, but, on the other hand, flirts with analytical perspective, when explaining disjunctive and hypothetical judgments as having essentially truth-functional form. Predication manifests at least three aspects: it is transitive, as explained above; it is a subordination, given that it classifies representations as superior/genus or inferior/species; and it has an intensional and an extensional aspect.
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