The Incomplete Deduction

Abstract

Once the ‘deduction’ has revealed the a priori elements of the understanding that are constitutive for knowledge, it looks as though the first part of the ‘Analytic’ is entirely complete. Nonetheless, Kant does not proceed immediately to the second part, but introduces a discussion which perhaps appears to delay the progress of the main argument yet also raises the reader’s interest and expectation: for he now thematises a third faculty of cognition (the ‘power of judgement’) which mediates between sensibility and the understanding and once again involves pre-empirical elements, namely what he calls ‘transcendental schemata’. The fact that there is no mention of the latter in Kant’s Reflections from the 1770s would suggest that they represent a final elaboration of his thought (Smith 1923²: 334). But even if he only recognises the necessity for transcendental schemata at a relatively late stage, the problem in question was already implicitly raised much earlier once Kant had drawn a sharp distinction between the faculties of sensibility and the understanding and thus rejected the view of Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten that all cognition could be regarded as a continuum. This emphatic distinction of Kant’s produces a gulf that it is the function of the power of judgement to bridge. Kant’s doctrine of the ‘schematism’ is a direct consequence of his mature acknowledgement of the indispensable role of sensibility.