Kant's Deduction and Apperception Explaining the Categories

by Schulting, Dennis

• ISBN13: 9780230358829
• ISBN10: 0230358829
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-27
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Dennis Schulting offers a thoroughgoing, analytic account of the first half of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the B-edition of Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonthat is different from existing interpretations in at least one important aspect: its central claim is that each of the 12 categories is wholly derivable from the principle of apperception, which goes against the current view that the Deduction is not a proof in a strict philosophical sense and the standard reading that in the Deduction Kant only gives an account of the global applicability of the categories to experience. This novel approach enables a reappraisal of Kant's controversial claim that transcendental self-consciousness is not only a necessary condition of objective experience but also sufficient for it. The book provides an extensive analysis of Kant's theory of transcendental apperception and also explains why the argument of the Transcendental Deduction is both a regressive and a progressive argument.

Author Biography

DENNIS SCHULTING is former Assistant Professor of Metaphysics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has published on Kant and German Idealism and is co-editor of The Continuum Companion to Kant (2012) and the collection of essays Kant's Idealism (2011).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations of Cited Works
Introduction: the Categories and Apperception
The 'Herz' Question
The Quid Juris
The Master Argument
The Unity in Thought. On the Guiding Thread
Apperception and the Categories of Modality
Apperception and the Categories of Relation
Apperception and the Categories of Quality
Apperception and the Categories of Quantity
From Apperception to Objectivity

Notes

Bibliography

Index