Imaginative Synthesis and the Basic Function of the Second Part of Kant's Transcendental Deduction in B

Reviewed by: Kant's Transcendental Deduction by Alison Laywine Katherine Dunlop Alison Laywine. Kant's Transcendental Deduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. iv + 318. Hardback, $80.00. Alison Laywine's contribution to the rich literature on Kant's "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories" stands out for the novelty of its approach and conclusions. Laywine's declared "strategy" is "to compare and contrast" the Deduction with the Duisburg Nachlaß, an important set of manuscript jottings from the 1770s (10). But her approach is also deeply informed by Kant's writings on metaphysics from the 1750s and 1760s; moreover, she gives attention to ancient Greek geometry and its importance for Kant's thought. I believe Laywine's most important interpretative claim is that the Transcendental Deduction's "final step" addresses "the question of how nature is possible" (210). Here, 'nature' is understood in what Kant calls the "formal sense," as "the totality of rules under which appearances must stand if they are to be thought as joined in one experience" (Prolegomena, §36; cf. B 165). This constitutes a novel answer to the problem posed in Dieter Henrich's landmark 1969 paper "The Proof Structure of the Transcendental Deduction" (Review of Metaphysics 22 [1969]: 640–59): how to understand §§21–26 of the (B-edition) Deduction as proving more than the thesis already stated in §20 (that the manifold in an intuition necessarily stands under the categories). Crucial support for Laywine's interpretation comes from §26 of the Deduction, which claims the possibility of cognizing objects "a priori through categories . . . as far as the laws of their combination are concerned, thus the possibility of as it were prescribing the law to nature and even making [nature] possible," is now "to be explained" (B 159). Kant does not use the term 'world' in this passage (as he does in Prolegomena §36). But Laywine contends that here the word 'nature' "has unmistakable, deliberate, cosmological connotations," and in fact "means 'world' in the sense of Kant's early cosmology": roughly, a whole unified by means of laws (12–13). The "cosmological" language of §26 does not recur in the following, officially concluding, section of the Deduction. So, we might ask whether Kant's explanation of how the understanding prescribes laws to nature is integral to the Deduction; Henry Allison, for instance, describes this explanation as an "appendix" (Kant's Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 9). The question of whether it belongs integrally has bite because, as Laywine makes clear in her "Conclusion," the universal laws at issue are just the Analogies of Experience. Thus, the passage could be read as the "promissory note with a forward-looking reference to the System of Principles" that she finds missing from the Deduction (289). Laywine meets such worries by arguing that "the reappropriation [from the pre-Critical period] of the general cosmology is actually [End Page 162] doing . . . a lot of hard work" in the Deduction (13). This sustained argument comes to a head in chapter 4, which contends that each of the two steps into which Laywine divides the first half of the (B-edition) Deduction, treated in chapters 2 and 3 (respectively), relies on cosmological presuppositions. Chapter 2 analyzes the conception of knowledge as relation to an object that is asserted (in §17) to rely on the synthetic unity of apperception. Laywine traces this conception to the Duisburg Nachlaß's account of "exposition," which relates concepts a priori to appearances, in something like the way that geometrical construction relates them to pure intuition. (Laywine further connects the Latin term expositio to the Greek ekthesis, which expositio translates in the context of geometrical proof. She thereby gives the notion of ekthesis broader importance than does Jaakko Hintikka, who noted its relevance to Kant's philosophy of mathematics in "Kant on the Mathematical Method" [Monist 51 (1967): 352–75]. Laywine claims that Borelli's edition of Euclid could have been Kant's source for the term, but I doubt it was known to Kant and his contemporaries, since it is not among the editions cited by Christian Wolff; Commandino seems likelier to me. Chapter 2 is concerned to articulate the notion of...

Kant's longstanding interests in science have been well documented. There are numerous studies devoted to Kant's early work on cosmology in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), and of course also to his interests in physics and his work on forces (1747), axial rotation (1754), the ages of the earth (1754), fire (1755), earthquakes (1756), winds (1757), and even to his discussion of volcanoes on the moon (1785). It is well known, moreover, that part of Kant's work in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was to ground the certainty of scientific claims against Hume's skepticism, and that Kant's program for securing our experience of the natural world extended to his later account of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). Less well known, however, is the realization that Kant's apparent bias toward the hard sciences has lain rather more in the interests of Kant scholars, than in Kant himself. Kant taught a course on Physical Geography every year for 40 years, for example, and he taught Anthropology for 24 years; between Kant's own writings and student lecture notes from these courses, researchers have in fact close to 3000 pages worth of material to consider. The aim of Kant's Organicism, therefore, was to provide a broader portrait of Kant by focusing, in my own case, on the important role played by the life sciences in his intellectual development.I began this investigation by following the course of life-science debates regarding organic generation in England and France between 1650 and 1750 before turning to a description of their influence in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. With this background established, the remainder of Kant's Organicism moved to the influential role played by models of embryological development for Kant's approach to understanding the cognitive processes responsible for the generation of knowledge. I closed the book with a reinterpretation of Kant's transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason since Kant's organic approach to reason, I argued, could alone make sense of the work needing to be done by the deduction itself.Throughout Kant's Organicism I had a number of audiences in mind. The first was the community of Kant scholars whose interpretations have shaped my understanding of Kant's epistemology as much as they had my knowledge of Kant's scientific theories. It was to this audience that I spoke in terms that were familiar within the terrain of Kant's metaphysics and epistemology, even as I sought, at every instance, to position traditional arguments against the backdrop of the life sciences, and to provide textual resources provided by Kant himself in support of the new vantage point. The second audience I had in mind for the book was composed of historians of science, for it was these scholars, above all, who had done the most work to recover Kant's remarks regarding generation theory, and who had looked most closely at his essays on the variation of species, and his theories connecting teleology and mechanism in the case of organic life. While I had learned a great deal from these discussions, I also saw that I could add to them in light of my own specialization in Kant's epistemology. Finally, I was interested in introducing this 'new' Kant to those versed in post-Kantian Continental philosophy, since I believed that part of their greater attraction to German Idealism lay precisely in the manner in which they had taken Kant's conclusions one step further than the Critical philosophy seemed prepared to go. My hope here was that once Kant was seen from a broader vantage point, a set of fresh connections and new opportunities for investigation would be opened up.With these preliminary remarks made, I want to turn now to the heart of the challenge facing my account of Kant so far as my three interlocutors have positioned it. By way of background, I can just say that I understand the Kant of the mid-1760s, the young Kant, the one still in search of a guiding problematic to pursue, whose self-described 'eclecticism' so inspired the young Herder, to have been in fact already on the cusp of greatness. …

Two-Steps-in-One-Proof: The Structure of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories J. CLAUDE EVANS DIETER I-IENRICH'S "The Proof-Structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction ,''~ which was originally published in 1969, quickly established itself as a classic essay in Kant scholarship. It is not so much Henrich's solution to the problem of the structure of the proof of the second-edition Deduction which has made such an impression as, rather, the unusual fact that his discussion of the problem as such has firmly established the major criterion for a hermeneutically optimal solution, and this criterion has set the standard for all subsequent investigations. Henrich refocused attention on the fact that according to Kant's own statements, the conclusions drawn in sections 20 and 26 respectively , which at first glance seem to be essentially the same, must be viewed as the conclusions to two different arguments, and that these two arguments together constitute the proof of the Transcendental Deduction. Thus, a hermeneutically optimal interpretation would demonstrate that the Transcendental Deduction does in fact consist of "two-steps-in-one-proof. ''~ Previous commentary had tended to consider such an optimal solution to be unattainable, and made use of other statements by Kant (from the very differentfirst edition) as the key to interpretations which, while ignoring Kant's own statements about the structure of the argument, were claimed to bring out the actual structure of the arguments which Kant presents. Such an interpretation, while not a hermeneutically optimal interpretation of the entire text of the ' Dieter Henrich, "The Proof-Structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction," Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968-69): 64o-59. Reprinted in Kant on Pure Reason, ed. Ralph C. S. Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 66-81; German: "Die Beweisstruktur von Kants transzendentaler Deduktion," in Kant: Zur Deutung seinerTheorieyon Erkennen und Handeln, ed. G. Prauss (Cologne, 1973),9o-lo4. ' Ibid., 642. [553] 554 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:4 OCTOBER I99O second-edition Deduction--since it is forced to discount Kant's own statements about the proof--would be claimed to be hermeneutically adequateto the proof itself. But Henrich argues that the two most influential interpretations, that of Adickes and Paton on the one hand, and that of Erdmann and de Vleeschauwer on the other hand, are not in fact hermeneutically adequate to the text. Thus, Henrich reopens the issue, calling for a renewed effort to find what I am calling a hermeneutically optimal solution, i.e., "an understanding of the proof of the deduction that would require the two-steps-in-one-proof thesis.''s Henrich's solution to the problem of the structure of the B-Deduction has not met with the same universal acclaim as his criterion for a solution. Indeed, there has been a long series of criticisms of this solution over the last fifteen years or so. In this paper I shall examine what I take to be the most important of these criticisms, dealing mainly with those by Henry Allison (section l) and Hoke Robinson (section 2).4 I shall then develop a modified version of Henrich's position which is not vulnerable to any of the criticisms raised against the original version (section 3). Finally, I shall show that none of these interpretations can claim to be the first hermeneutically optimal solution to the problem of the proof-structure of the B-Deduction (section 4). 1. Henrich argues that the first step of the B-Deduction (w167 15-2o ) "established that intuitions are subject to the categories insofar as they, as intuitions, already possess unity.''s It thus contains what Henrich calls a "restriction," which Kant indicates both by the expression "so far [sofern]"and by the phrase "in Einer Anschauung" (B143), with its capital E, which Henrich takes to be indicative of unity (Einheit) rather than singularity, as Kemp Smith's translation has it.6 Because this restriction is made, the argument of w167 16-2o "does not yet clarify for us the range within which unitary intuitions can be found.''7 Kant then Ibid., 644. 4 Henry Allison, "Reflections on the B-Deduction," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 25 0986), Supplement: 1-15...

One of the principle aims of the B version of Kant's transcenden- tal deduction is to show how it is possible that the same 'I think' can accom- pany all of my representations, which is a transcendental condition of the possibility of judgment. Contra interpreters such as A. Brook, show that this 'I think' is an a priori (reflective) self-consciousness; contra P. Keller, show that this a priori self-consciousness is first and foremost a conscious- ness of one's personal from a first person point of view. Are there good transcendental arguments for the persistence of the self throughout changes in its representational states? Kant's transcendental deduction can be read as such an argument. This paper provides a recon- struction of the B-edition of Kant's Transcendental Deduction in terms of what Dieter Henrich has termed an identity deduction, 1 namely, an analy- sis of the conditions of the possibility for cognizing the I think necessary for both concept formation and judgment. On this reading, a significant aim of the transcendental deduction (TD) is to show that only through an a priori transcendental employment of the categories can the I think be determined at all. Hence, such an a priori transcendental employment must be presupposed for even the most rudimentary empirical judgments to be possible. Such an analysis of the TD, as one whose fundamental problem is the establishment of the conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, is consistent with view- ing the B-edition version of the deduction as a single proof in two steps: 2

Robert Howell, Kant's Transcendental Deduction. An Analysis of Main Themes in His Critical Philosophy. Synthese Library Volume 222. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academical Publishers, 1992, pp xxiv + 424, Hb $131 - Volume 14 Issue 1-2

There is a model of transcendental arguments with which we are all familiar, which I shall call anti-sceptical. A transcendental argument for a conclusion X, on the anti-sceptical model, proceeds by arguing that for a condition Y to be possible, X must be the case. Since the value of a transcendental argument is thought to consist in its ability to combat scepticism, Y should be a condition the sceptic must accept and X a condition he calls into doubt. Some transcendental arguments let Y be the condition of speaking a language and then argue that the sceptic's very ability to state his doubts about X show that X must be the case. The strongest form of transcendental argument is thought to let Y be self-conscious experience. For no interesting sceptic can deny that we have such a mental life; so if the transcendental argument is valid, it is thought, the sceptic is genuinely undermined. The paradigm of a transcendental argument is thought to be Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the categories. However, had Kant thought that the Transcendental Deduction merely showed that for experience to be possible it must conform to the categories, he would have considered his argument a failure.' Indeed, before he even mentions the need for a Transcendental Deduction, Kant has already argued that all our thinking must conform to the categories. Kant argues, in the Analytic of Concepts, chapter one, that every act of the understanding is a judgement and every judgement must employ its associated category. So if self-conscious experience involves any thinking, it will have to employ the categories. The Transcendental Deduction, by contrast, aims to show that we are entitled to employ the concepts which Kant has already argued we must employ in any thinking. It is, of course, possible to see that the Transcendental Deduction is concerned with the legitimation of

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.

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.

Kant's Deduction of Freedom and Morality KARL AMERIKS I. IT HAS ALWAYSBEENRECOGNIZEDthat within Kant's philosophy the problem of a justification of freedom and the moral law has a central significance. ~Moreover, for any philosopher interested in a defense of freedom and morality in a strict sense, Kant is no doubt still the figure to whom one would first turn. Yet even among Kant scholars there remains a fundamental unclarity about not only the validity but also the very meaning of Kant's major treatment of these issues in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. In particular, there has been a lack of agreement about how to explain one apparent striking difference between these two texts. In the first work Kant seems to desire and develop a theoretical argument for freedom in a sense which is absolute and from which the objective validity of the moral law is to be deduced. In the second work, however, Kant appears directly to reverse himself and to replace this project of a strict deduction2 with the idea that the moral law (i.e., its validity, not its entire exact formulation and implications) is simply given as an "a priori fact of reason" (from which alone freedom can then be inferred). Most commentators have admitted the appearance of a troublesome conflict here, but they have argued that there is a deeper "reconciliationist" interpretation which shows that Kant has a position that is both consistent and defensible. Thus some (e.g., H. J. Paton and Dieter Henrich) have said that in fact the Foundations properly anticipates the Critique by not genuinely meaning to offer a strict deduction. Others (notably Lewis White Beck) have accepted that there is something like a strict deduction in the Foundations but have taken it to be continued and in effect well continued in the second Critique . These lines of interpretation are obviously in conflict with one another, and I believe they are both unsatisfactory. I will argue not merely that Kant truly does change his Work on this article was made possible by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The author is also indebted to Professors Gerold Prauss and W. D. Solomon, and to a referee of this journal. -' By "strict deduction" (or "categorical proof') here I mean a "linear" argument intended to be logically sound with premises that are all only theoretical as opposed to practical in any Kantian moral sense. I do not claim that this is generally what Kant must mean by a "deduction." (For details on Kant's notion of a "transcendental deduction" see my "Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument," KantStudien 69 [1978], and Dieter Henrich, "Die Deduktion des Sittengesetzes," in Denken im Schanen des Nihilismus , ed. Alexander Schwan [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975].) My main claim is simply that both the need for something at least approximating a strict deduction of freedom and morality, and a clear attempt to provide one, can be found in Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, whereas in Kant's later work this is definitely not the case. [531 54 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY position just as he appears to at first sight, but also that in each case he has a view that is intrinsically and Critically suspect. At the same time I will attempt to vindicate Kant somewhat by showing that his views undergo what is at least an understandable development , and that often the weaknesses of these views are best appreciated on the basis of considerations suggested by Kant himself. Ultimately, however, there remains in Kant a central and insufficiently justified belief in an intrinsic connection between morality and absolute freedom. For other philosophers who still believe in such a connection there is meant to be a challenge in my conclusion that a sympathetic but rigorous analysis of even Kant's view leaves it entangled in inconsistencies or very suspicious premises . In addition, at a strictly historical level my findings are meant to shed light on the central role of the notion of freedom in the development of Kant's entire system. Kant's attachment to absolute freedom can be shown to be rooted...

This paper considers how Descartes's and Hume's sceptical challenges were appropriated by Christian Wolff and Johann Nicolaus Tetens specifically in the context of projects related to Kant's in the transcendental deduction. Wolff introduces Descartes's dream hypothesis as an obstacle to his account of the truth of propositions, or logical truth, which he identifies with the 'possibility' of empirical concepts. Tetens explicitly takes Hume's account of our idea of causality to be a challenge to the `reality' of transcendent concepts in general, a challenge he addresses by locating the source of this concept in the understanding rather than in the imagination. After considering this background, I turn to Kant's deployment of apparently traditional sceptical concerns at the outset of the transcendental deduction and argue that he does not there intend to introduce a global sceptical challenge and, accordingly, that there are historical grounds for doubting that the transcendental deduction is intended as an anti-sceptical argument.

In the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant wrote: I know of no investigations that would be more important for getting to the bottom of the faculty that we call understanding and at the same time for determining the rules and limits of its employment than those that I have undertaken in the second part of the Transcendental Analytic, under the title of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding; they have also cost me the most, but not, I hope, unrewarded effort.” (A XVI) However, the initial response to Kant's argument, which he also titled the “transcendental deduction of the categories” (A 85 /B 117), was largely one of incomprehension, and in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, Kant himself acknowledged that precisely “that part of the Critique which should have been the clearest was the most obscure, or even revolved in a circle” (4:474 n.). So in the second edition of the Critique , published the following year, Kant completely rewrote the transcendental deduction. He claimed that this revision touched only the manner of “ presentation ,” not the “propositions themselves and their grounds of proof” (B xxxvii-xxxviii). But in spite of Kant's efforts at clarification, the intervening two centuries have brought little agreement in the interpretation of the deduction, even on the fundamental question of whether the two editions of the Critique , in 1781 and 1787, try to answer the same question by means of the same argument. The last three decades alone have brought forth dozens of competing interpretations or “reconstructions” of Kant's transcendental deduction.

Kant wrote two versions of the Transcendental Deduction, the first, “A-”Deduction in 1781, and the second, “B-”Deduction in 1787. Since Henrich's “The Proof Structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction”, most work on the Transcendental Deduction attempts to make sense of the B-Deduction's two-step argument structure. Though the A-Deduction has suffered comparative neglect, it has received some attention from interpreters who take its extended treatment of the “subjective” side of cognition to amount to a brand of proto-functionalism. Whatever the merits and demerits of these proto-functionalist approaches, they tend to deemphasize the two arguments that constitute the “objective” side of the A-Deduction, the “argument from above” and then the “argument from below”. Since Kant himself refers to this objective side of the A-Deduction as the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding”, it is surprising that the structure of these arguments has not received closer scrutiny. This is doubly true since Kant actually claims that his revisions for the 1787 version of the Deduction impacted only the “presentation” of it. Any lessons learned from the central arguments of the A-Deduction should help clarify the structure of its younger and more closely studied brother.

The ultimate aim of this essay is to explicate and justify Kant's transcendental deduction of the category of causality. To put the matter simply, it seeks to show that there are causal relations. This is successfully accomplished 1f it can be shown, granting _ the empirical reality of time as a necessary condition of experience, that the empirical. reality of causal relations is a necessary condition of the empirical. reality of time. This demonstration involves three steps. First, it is argued that the empirical reality of something permanent is a necessary condition of the empirical reality of time. (This is preceded by an argument for the claim that time is a necessary form of intuition). This follows from the fact that the intuitive representation of time involves the idea of a unity (i.e., time) which remains numerically identical despite the manifold of passing moments contained in it. It is then argued that the empirical reality of time involves the empirical. reality of a phenomenon which emood1es the property of numerical identity across time, and which, hence, is permanent. This is a fundamental contention of the "First Analogy.” Secondly, it is argued that the empirical. reality of matter is a necessary condition of the empirical reality of something permanent. This argument centers on the notion of a numerically identical object to which different appearances may be related. It is concluded that the possession of spatial relations is a necessary condition of the possession of numerical identity, and further, that being in space makes possible the distinction between the (permanent) object and its representation. This contention is contained, in modified form, in the second edition "Refutation of Idealism." Thirdly, it is argued that the empirical reality of causal relations is a necessary condition of the empirical reality of matter. Taking matter to be that which is capable of alteration, the argument focuses upon the concept of objective succession. It is contended that the concept of objective succession involves the notion of a necessary, or, irreversible sequence of representations, that is, a sequence determined by the object. Significantly, the necessity of this notion does not follow by virtue of an analysis of the given concept of objective succession, but rather, stems from the need to add, in synthetic manner, a scheme, or, "supporting intuition," which will render the concept "serviceable" in experience. The argument for causality is presented in the "Second Analogy." By

Kant's transcendental deduction and his conception of transcendental and empirical self-consciousness are subjected to Wittgensteinian criticism. The roots of Kant's conception of transcendental apperception are exposed, and the doctrine of transcendental synthesis is found wanting. While his criticisms of the ‘rationalist doctrine of the soul’ are brilliant, Kant's conception of apperception is still in thrall to Cartesian/Lockean misconceptions about consciousness and self-consciousness. Most importantly, he confuses a fictitious form of self-consciousness (the ‘I think’ that must be capable of accompanying all my representations) with the ability to say what one perceives and that one perceives it (the ‘I say’ that must be capable of accompanying all my perceptions). The Kantian ‘I think’ is neither a form of self-consciousness nor an accompaniment of self-consciousness. Kant failed to see that the possibility of groundless (original) self-ascription of experience depends on mastery of the grounds (constitutive criteria) for the other-ascription of experience. His mistaken analysis is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein's.

Die Funken des freien Geistes: Neuere Aufsätze zu Nietzsches Philosophie der Zukunft