Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I Revisiting the capacity to judge
- PART II The human standpoint in the Transcendental Analytic
- 4 Kant on a priori concepts: the metaphysical deduction of the categories
- 5 Kant's deconstruction of the principle of sufficient reason
- 6 Kant on causality: what was he trying to prove?
- 7 Kant's standpoint on the whole: disjunctive judgment, community, and the Third Analogy of Experience
- Part III The human standpoint in the critical system
- Bibliography
- Index of citations
- Index of subjects
4 - Kant on a priori concepts: the metaphysical deduction of the categories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I Revisiting the capacity to judge
- PART II The human standpoint in the Transcendental Analytic
- 4 Kant on a priori concepts: the metaphysical deduction of the categories
- 5 Kant's deconstruction of the principle of sufficient reason
- 6 Kant on causality: what was he trying to prove?
- 7 Kant's standpoint on the whole: disjunctive judgment, community, and the Third Analogy of Experience
- Part III The human standpoint in the critical system
- Bibliography
- Index of citations
- Index of subjects
Summary
In chapter 1 of the Transcendental Analytic, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant establishes a table of the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding, according to the “leading thread” of a table of the logical forms of judgment. He proclaims that this achievement takes after and improves upon Aristotle's own endeavor in offering a list of categories, which Aristotle took to define the most general kinds of being. Kant claims that his table is superior to Aristotle's list in that it is grounded on a systematic principle. This principle is also what will eventually ground, in the Transcendental Deduction, the a priori justification of the objective validity of the categories: a justification of the claim that all objects (as long as they are objects of a possible experience) do fall under those categories.
Kant's self-proclaimed achievement is the second main step in his effort to answer the question: “how are synthetic a priori judgments possible”? The first step was the argument offered in the Transcendental Aesthetic, to the effect that space and time are a priori forms of intuition. As such, Kant argued, they make possible judgments (propositions) whose claim to truth is justified a priori by the universal features of our intuitions. Such propositions are thus both synthetic and a priori. They are synthetic in that their truth does not rest on the mere analysis of the subject-concept of the proposition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant on the Human Standpoint , pp. 81 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
- 1
- Cited by