Abstract
This chapter spells out in detail how Kant’s thinking about logic during the critical period shapes the account of philosophy that he gives in the Critiques. Tolley explores Kant’s motivations behind his formation of the idea of a new “transcendental” logic, drawing out in particular how he means to differentiate it from the traditional “merely formal” approaches to logic, insofar as transcendental logic investigates not just the basic forms of the activity of thinking but also its basic contents. Kant’s understanding of both of these logics directly factor into the first Critique’s more general project of the critique of reason in particular, as not just a capacity for a certain kind of thinking (inferring), but as a possible source of a priori cognition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
The book that appeared in 1800 under the title of Immanuel Kants Logik was not authored by Kant himself, but was written up by one of his students, G. B. Jäsche, on the basis of Kant’s lecture notes, and there is no evidence that Kant himself ever reviewed Jäsche’s manuscript at any stage of its composition. See Terry Boswell, “On the Textual Authenticity of Kant’s Logic,” History and Philosophy of Logic 9, no. 2 (1988): 193–203; and J. Michael Young, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Lectures on Logic by Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xv–xxxii.
- 2.
For the significance of Kant’s views on logic for his early writings, see Peter Yong, “God, Totality and Possibility in Kant’s Only Possible Argument,” Kantian Review 19, no. 1 (March 2014): 27–51; and Nicholas F. Stang, Kant’s Modal Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For the significance of Kant’s changing views on logic for the emergence of the critical philosophy, see R. Lanier Anderson, The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant’s Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For the centrality of Kant’s conception of logic within the critical philosophy itself compare Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); John MacFarlane, “Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism,” Philosophical Review 111, no. 1 (Jan. 2002): 25–65; Clinton Tolley, “Kant’s Conception of Logic” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007); Huaping Lu-Adler, “Kant on Proving Aristotle’s Logic as Complete,” Kantian Review 21, no. 1 (March 2016): 1–26; and Anderson, Poverty of Conceptual Truth.
- 3.
Compare Tolley, “Kant’s Conception of Logic,” 30. See also Chapter 2 of this volume.
- 4.
It is worth noting that “the doctrine of reason [Vernunftlehre]” was a common title for logic at the time. It was, in fact, the title of the textbook by Georg Meier that Kant used for his own lectures on logic.
- 5.
As Kant puts it at the outset of the Transcendental Logic and elsewhere, logic is “the science of the rules of understanding in general” (A52/B76). Very similar definitions can be found in Kant’s lectures and notes (Reflexionen) on logic. Compare, for instance, the Latin rendering given in the 1790s Vienna Logic: “Definition. Logica est scientia regularum universalium usus intellectus” (VL 24:792; see also Ak 16:46 [R1628]); see also the earlier (1773–1775) Reflexion 1603: “Logic is an a priori science of the [universal] pure laws of the understanding and reason in general” (NF 16:33).
- 6.
This is so, even if Kant often uses the term “understanding in general” in what he calls its “broad designation,” which encompasses all three of these “powers of the mind [Gemütkräfte]” (A131/B169; see also An 7:196–97). This broad designation also carries over for the use of the term “thinking” (see LM 29:888–89).
- 7.
This subordination of logic to psychology is made especially vivid in the classification that Alexander Baumgarten gives in his Acroasis logica, §37. See Clinton Tolley, “The Relation between Ontology and Logic in Kant,” in International Yearbook for German Idealism, ed. Dina Emundts and Sally Sedgwick, vol. 12 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 95–98.
- 8.
Compare Warren Goldfarb, “Frege’s Conception of Logic,” in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25–41; for discussion, see MacFarlane, “Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism.”
- 9.
Again compare Tolley, “Relation between Ontology and Logic in Kant.” See also Hilary Putnam, “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 245–63. Note as well that, with respect to the traditional logic, Kant also is at some distance from those, such as Bolzano and Frege, who take logic to be concerned first and foremost with the contents of thinking (for Bolzano: “propositions [Sätze] an sich”; for Frege, “thoughts [Gedanken]”) rather than the acts of thinking or their ultimate objects.
- 10.
For further references to pre-Kantian specifications of logic as an “art,” see Tolley, “Kant’s Conception of Logic,” 52–70.
- 11.
By introducing such divisions with logic, Kant is picking up (and partially reorganizing) various threads from his predecessors in early modern philosophy of logic; compare Tolley, “Kant’s Conception of Logic,” 25–29.
- 12.
Kant also calls them “basic [Grund-],” “root [Stamm-],” “original [ursprüngliche],” “primitive” concepts (B107–8).
- 13.
For helpful discussion on the points in this section, see Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge.
- 14.
Interestingly, there do not seem to be parallel pure contents (concepts) that arise out of forms of acts of the power of judgment, though it is of course this power that is responsible for generating pure judgments (“principles [Grundsätze]”) concerning the application of concepts to objects. See section (“From the Science of Thinking to the Critique of Cognition from Reason”); see also A159/B198.
- 15.
In fact, the ideas arise not directly from the relevant logical forms of unifying representations (concepts) in individual inferences, but only from the further acts of synthesizing all inferences of a specific form in relation to whatever would function as the “unconditioned” that contains the “totality” of the grounds or conditions for whatever is represented as being conditioned in any given individual inference (see A322–23/B379–80). In this respect, these contents are perhaps more closely related to the fourth kind of thinking noted above – namely, that of systematically ordering into a scientific unity. (Compare the discussion below in the next section.) For our purposes, however, we can bracket the complications introduced into the parallel metaphysical deduction of the ideas by this further inclusion of a reference to the whole or “totality” of conditions and the unconditioned. For more on this, see Eric Watkins, “Kant on the Unconditioned,” unpublished manuscript.
- 16.
For a recounting of some of this history, see Jeremy Heis, “Attempts to Rethink Logic,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Allen W. Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 95–132.
- 17.
For more on the distinction between thinking and cognizing, and the conditions for cognition, see Clinton Tolley, “The Generality of Kant’s Transcendental Logic,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 3 (July 2012): 417–46; and Eric Watkins and Marcus Willaschek, “Kant’s Account of Cognition,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 83–112.
- 18.
Here we can see, in Kant’s reconception of logic, a twofold response to Hume’s worries concerning what Kant is identifying as the pure concepts. On the one hand, with the metaphysical deduction of such concepts out of the traditional-logical forms of thinking, Kant means to demonstrate, against Hume, that concepts like that of substance-inherence and cause-effect in fact have a “purely logical” or intellectual origin, rather than an empirical or aesthetic one, or an origin as “a bastard of the imagination”; that is, Kant means to demonstrate, to the contrary, that our understanding (and reason) on its own – independently of experience, imagination, or sensibility – does have “the capacity to think such connections in general” (Pro 4:257–58, translation modified). On the other hand, Kant nevertheless agrees with Hume’s related worry that the mere fact of our possession of such concepts does not on its own demonstrate either the existence of any actual objects that correspond to such concepts or that we have the capacity to cognize these objects. That is, Kant accepts that, beyond the first response to Hume’s challenge concerning the pure concepts (the metaphysical deduction), a second response is necessary, concerning the question of the role of such concepts in our claims to cognition of objects: with what right (quid juris) do we take there to be objects corresponding to these concepts, and with what right do we claim to be able to cognize these objects? And while the first response to Hume can be given within logic alone, the second requires appeal to the Aesthetic.
- 19.
This arguably provides the proper template for understanding the difference between the two “steps” of the B-deduction that Dieter Henrich brought into focus, though Henrich himself does not characterize the significance of the transition in the way I am doing here (i.e., according to the distinction between thinking and cognizing). See Dieter Henrich, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics 22, no. 4 (June 1969): 640–59.
- 20.
Anderson, Poverty of Conceptual Truth, 103; also 31.
- 21.
For a discussion of this sort of criticism (with references to various historical instances of it), along with a defense of Kant against this sort of charge, see especially Karl Ameriks, Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003).
- 22.
Compare as well Kant’s remarks at the end of the Prolegomena about reason’s need to “assume” and “think” of the existence of certain intelligible beings, in order to make sense of appearances (Pro 4:355).
- 23.
For more on the categories of freedom, compare Susanne Bobzien, “Die Kategorien der Freiheit bei Kant,” in Kant: Analysen-Probleme-Kritik, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Gerhard Seel (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1988), 193–220; and Ralf M. Bader, “Kant and the Categories of Freedom,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17, no. 4 (Sept. 2009): 799–820.
- 24.
Compare the remarks from Kant’s lectures on logic, where it is explicitly allowed that formal logic “can have to do with practical cognition” as well as “speculative cognition,” since “nothing belongs to logic except the logical form of all cognitions, i.e., the form of thought, without regard to the content” and “practical cognition is distinct from speculative cognition as to content” (VL 24:903).
- 25.
Concerning the judgments of the beautiful, compare §1: “In seeking the moments to which this power of judgment attends in its reflection, I have been guided by the logical functions for judging (for a relation to the understanding is always contained even in the judgment of taste)” (CJ 5:203n). Concerning judgments of the sublime, compare §24 (CJ 5:247), in which Kant deploys the distinction between mathematical and dynamical categories from the first Critique (see §11 [B109–13]). (The connections between either the logical forms or categories and the dimensions of teleological judgment are much less explicit.)
- 26.
As Kant anticipates in §11 of the B-edition, the table of categories not only “completely contains all the elementary concepts of the understanding,” but it also contains “even the form of a system of them in the human understanding” (B109–10).
- 27.
I would like to thank Eric Watkins and Samantha Matherne for helpful discussion of earlier versions of this material.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tolley, C. (2017). The Place of Logic within Kant’s Philosophy. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54655-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54656-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)