Immanuel Kant Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Kant's theory of judgment=== {{See also|Category (Kant)}} [[File:Immanuelkant.JPG|thumb|Kant statue in the School of Philosophy and Human Sciences (FAFICH) in the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), [[Belo Horizonte]], Brazil]] Following the "Transcendental Analytic" is the "Transcendental Logic". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding ("Transcendental Analytic") and, second, with the faculty of ''reason'' as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles ("Transcendental Dialectic"). The "Transcendental Analytic" is further divided into two sections. The first, "Analytic of Concepts", is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the ''pure'' concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous "transcendental deduction". The second, "Analytic of Principles", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in ''empirical'' judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=4β13}} ====Transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding==== The "Analytic of Concepts" argues for the universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, for instance, the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a ''thing in general''{{mdash}}that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the ''a priori'' forms of intuition, are the basis of all synthetic ''a priori'' cognition. According to [[Paul Guyer|Guyer]] and [[Allen W. Wood|Wood]], "Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects."{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=8}} Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as the "metaphysical deduction", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, however, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic ''a priori'' cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=89β90}} This argument, provided under the heading "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the ''Critique''. Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' Axi</ref> Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= Β§2(e)}}{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc = Β§4}} The "Transcendental Deduction" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to the objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, "He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories."{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=9}} Kant's principle of apperception is that "The '''I think''' must '''be able''' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me."<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B131-32</ref> The ''necessary'' possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time, is an ''a priori'' conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc = Β§4.1}} This, however, is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents. ====Principles of pure understanding==== Kant's deduction of the categories in the "Analytic of Concepts", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the "Analytic of Principles" is to show both ''that'' they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and ''how'' it is they do so.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=9β10}} In the first book<!--????--> of this section<!--????--> on the "[[Schema (Kant)|schematism]]", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds a connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=10β11}} The fourth chapter of this section, "The Analogies of Experience", marks a shift from "mathematical" to "dynamical" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the ''Critique''.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=11}} The analogies are three in number: # ''Principle of persistence of substance'': Kant is here concerned with the general conditions of determining time-relations among the objects of experience. He argues that the unity of time implies that "all change must consist in the alteration of states in an underlying substance, whose existence and quantity must be unchangeable or conserved."<ref>see Kant, ''CPuR'' A182β26/B224β36</ref> # ''Principle of temporal succession according to the law of causality'': Here Kant argues that "we can make determinate judgments about the objective succession of events, as contrasted to merely subjective successions of representations, only if every objective alteration follows a necessary rule of succession, or a causal law." This is Kant's most direct rejoinder to [[Humeanism#Causality_and_necessity|Hume's skepticism about causality]].<ref>see Kant, ''CPuR'' A186β211/B232β56</ref> # ''Principle of simultaneity according to the law of reciprocity or community'': The final analogy argues that "determinate judgments that objects (or states of substance) in different regions of space exists simultaneously are possible only if such objects stand in mutual causal relation of community or reciprocal interaction." (This is Kant's rejoinder to [[Leibniz]]'s thesis in the ''[[Monadology]]''.)<ref>see Kant, ''CPuR'' A211-15/B256-62</ref>{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=11β12}} The fourth section of this chapter, which is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the ''Critique''. The B edition, however, includes one more short section, "The Refutation of Idealism". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a "critical" or "formal" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=12}} The final chapter of "The Analytic of Principles" distinguishes ''phenomena'', of which we have can have genuine knowledge, from ''noumena'', a term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer "in a negative sense".{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=12β13}} An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its "dogmatic" metaphysics confuses the "mere features of concepts through which we think things...[with] features of the objects themselves". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon the necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=13}} Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page