Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on sources
- Introduction
- Part I Kant's early view
- Part II The transcendental deduction from 1781 to 1787
- 3 The real premises of the deduction
- 4 The deduction from knowledge of objects
- 5 The deduction and apperception
- Part III The principles of empirical knowledge
- Part IV The refutation of idealism
- Part V Transcendental idealism
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index of passages cited
- General index
5 - The deduction and apperception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on sources
- Introduction
- Part I Kant's early view
- Part II The transcendental deduction from 1781 to 1787
- 3 The real premises of the deduction
- 4 The deduction from knowledge of objects
- 5 The deduction and apperception
- Part III The principles of empirical knowledge
- Part IV The refutation of idealism
- Part V Transcendental idealism
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
Through much of the 1780s, especially in the period between the two editions of the Critique, Kant placed his chief hopes for a deduction of the categories in the argument directly from the concepts of object and/or judgment, which can but seem to us to beg his most fundamental questions: the need for knowledge of objects at all, as well as the difference between mere logical functions of judgment and the genuine categories of substance, causation, and interaction. But in each of the two editions of the Critique Kant does also attempt to deduce our a priori knowledge of the objective validity of the categories from a conception of apperception as a cognitively significant form of self-consciousness which is not, at least immediately, simply identified with judgments about objects claiming necessary truth. For all its potential importance, Kant's treatment of apperception and its necessary conditions is much more condensed than one might have expected after his initial investigations of it in the 1770s, and much too brief for his purposes. Some take this as evidence that Kant was simply more interested in the polemical applications of his “critical philosophy” than in its own foundations. But there is an alternative explanation for Kant's surprisingly – and disappointingly – brief treatment of apperception.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Kant and the Claims of Knowledge , pp. 131 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987