Focusing on Kant's theoretical philosophy, this work delves into the doctrine of transcendental idealism and explores key elements of the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions. It examines the intricate relationship between the deduction arguments and idealism, providing a detailed analysis of Kant's concepts and their implications for understanding knowledge and reality.
In this book, Dennis Schulting presents a staunch defence of Kant’s radical subjectivism about the possibility of knowledge. This defence is mounted by means of a comprehensive analysis of what is arguably the centrepiece of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , namely, the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. Radical subjectivism about the possibility of knowledge is to be understood as the thesis that the possibility of knowledge of objects essentially and wholly depends on subjective functions of thought, or the capacity to judge by virtue of transcendental apperception, given sensory input. Subjectivism thus defined is not about merely the necessary conditions of knowledge, but nor is it claimed that it grounds the very existence of things. Novel interpretations are provided of such central themes as the objective unity of apperception, the threefold synthesis, judgement, truth and objective validity, spontaneity in judgement, figurative synthesis and spatialunity, nonconceptual content, idealism and the thing in itself, and material synthesis. One chapter is dedicated to the interpretation of the Deduction by Kant’s most prominent successor, G. W. F. Hegel, and throughout Schulting critically engages with the work of contemporary readers of Kant such as Lucy Allais, Robert Hanna, John McDowell, Robert Pippin, and James Van Cleve.
An Essay on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
The central novel claim of the book is that in the B-Deduction Kant provides a proof of the derivability of each of the twelve categories from the principle of apperception. This goes against the current view that the Transcendental Deduction is not
The book offers a thoroughgoing, analytic account of the Deduction of the Categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that is different from existing interpretations in at least one important aspect: its central claim is that the categories are derivable from the principle of apperception.