Concepts and Categories: Transcendental Logic and the Metaphysical Deduction

Abstract

This chapter discusses Kant's systemic conception of the First Critique; the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ which is the first main division of the ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Elements’; the second main division is the ‘Transcendental Logic’. The two divisions correspond to two aspect of our being sensorily passive intelligences, and Kant opens the Transcendental Logic with a clear statement of his ‘doctrine of two sources’. In essence, then, transcendental logic is concerned with the most general principles of our thinking about objects experienced, as in space and time. Kant proceeds to break down the genus logic into various subspecies. Logic, he tells us, can concern either the general use or particular (specialized) uses of the understanding and each sort of logic can, in turn, be either pure or applied. General logic is, so to speak, ‘all-purpose’ or ‘topic-neutral’ logic. The logic of a particular or specialized use of the understanding contrast, concerns ‘the rules for correctly thinking about a certain kind of objects’. As Kant understands matter, to put it slightly differently, what makes logic pure and formal is that it concerns only relations among concepts, independently of the content of those concepts.