Abstract
Kant’s theory of cognition appeals to a host of for ms, representational contents, faculties, and synthetic acts. One thing to which Kant’s interpreters aspire is a better understanding of how these various explanatory grounds relate to one another. In some cases we are given substantial hints. For instance, there can be little doubt that the fact that our understanding operates by actualizing certain “functions” – such as the disjunctive function that is used when we judge disjunctive propositions – explains our possession of the categories, in this case the category of community. Yet even here Kant is content to leave us to fill in the details. The functions are doubtless only a partial explanation of the categories and it is less clear what else is required for a full explanation. Worse, the explanatory dependence of the categories upon the functions stands out for the amount of explicit attention that Kant devotes to it. The explanatory relations between most other explananda are more obscure. For instance, how precisely does the representation <I> relate to the functions?1 Or what about <I> and the concept or concepts that allow us to grasp and pursue the ideal of complete systematic unity?
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Notes
There are reasons to suspect that the most precise method for cataloguing fundamental explanatory grounds would be to compile a list of synthetic propositions, none of which can be derived from some subset of the others. We would do well to work at compiling such a list. However, Kant’s own preferred format for addressing the question is to focus on sources of unity, and I will be following him in this chapter. For a work that covers related topics, though focusing much more on post-Kantian developments, see Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Ludger Honnefelder takes §12 to say that the tradition had understood the tran-scendentals, like Kant, as logical requirements of all cognition, and that its mistake was merely to have taken the transcendentals also as ontological categories (Ludger Honnefelder, “Metaphysics as a Discipline: From the ‘Transcendental Philosophy of the Ancients’ to Kant’s Notion of Transcendental Philosophy,” in The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700 , ed. Russell L. Friedman and Lauge O. Nielsen [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003], 66). I see no basis for this in the text.
Though there is much to be learned from some of the existing secondary literature on §12, I have not found any that makes explanation central to the theory that it is proposing. I recommend: Gudrun Schulz, Veritas est adaequatio intel-lectus et rei (Leiden: Brill, 1993);
Gerhard Schönrich, Kategorien und transzendentale Argumentation. Kant und die Idee einer transzendentalen Semiotik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 290–93;
and most thoroughly, Paul Natterer, Systematischer Kommentar zur “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), 343–66. Natterer provides references to further secondary literature and to passages from the Nachlaß that I lack the space to treat.
Georg Friedrich Meier’s description in §422 of his Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre , the textbook for Kant’s logic lectures, uses precisely the same terms that figure in §12: “grounds” precede “consequences” in synthetic method; in analytic method the reverse is the case (reprinted in Ak 16:786). For an interpretation of the distinction as it figures in the Transcendental Deduction, see Melissa McBay Merritt, “Science and the Synthetic Method of the Critique of Pure Reason,” Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 3 (March 2006): 517–39.
Kant explains this sense of apriority at the start of the B-edition Introduction. The inquiry in that example is grounded on, and thus relative to, the principle that bodies are heavy (B2). For an attempt to make this notion of apriority fruitful, cf. Houston Smit, “Kant on Apriority and the Spontaneity of Cognition,” in Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams , ed. Samuel Newlands and Larry Jorgensen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 188–251. For an attempt to reconstruct the foundations of Kant’s moral philosophy using a conception of apriority that is relative to the inquiry in which a particular cognition is embedded, see
Timothy Rosenkoetter, “Kant on Construction, Apriority, and the Moral Relevance of Universalization,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19, no. 6 (2011): 1143–74, esp. 1161–63.
For a fuller treatment of the role of transcendental truth and order in the first Critique , see Timothy Rosenkoetter, “Truth Criteria and the Very Project of a Transcendental Logic,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 91, no. 2 (June 2009): 193–236. That article was able to ignore §12, since T 2 is simply a different concept from “transcendental truth” in the sense of order (cf. Ak 28:414, title). As noted at the close of the previous section, the fact that we are subjectively incapable of entertaining hypotheses that compete with pure apperception makes T 2 irrelevant to the apperception-hypothesis. Two further points that would benefit from more extended treatment can only be mentioned in this contest. First, ascriptions of <transcendental truth> in the sense of order, in contrast to T 2 , are not relative to a subject’s epistemic situation. Second, T 2 is a scalar property, whereas a manifold either possesses order or lacks order.
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Rosenkoetter, T. (2014). Kant’s Three Transcendentals, Explanation, and the Hypothesis of Pure Apperception. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_4
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