In this chapter I return to the objective side of Kant's epistemological project. In Chapter 4 I discussed the ‘Transcendental Deduction’, which, it is often thought, provides the whole of the objective deduction. My aim is to show that the legitimation of the categories requires not only the whole of the ‘Analytic’, but also recognition of the aesthetic dimension of his epistemological argument. It is unavoidable that in our investigation of the relation between Kant's accounts of cognitive and aesthetic judgement, we are forced to proceed in a zigzag. The reciprocal relation between cognition and aesthetic I am in the course of defending simply cannot be traced out in a linear fashion.

As many commentators have recognised, Kant's hopes for the conclusiveness of the ‘Transcendental Deduction’ turned out to be rather premature. In both the A Preface and in the ‘Transition to the Deduction’ Kant claimed that he would establish the objective validity of the categories insofar as they relate to objects of experience a priori and necessarily. Meanwhile, in the B edition ‘Deduction’, Kant claims that the categories apply to all perception, to the possibility of experience and therefore to all objects of experience. In later sections of the ‘Analytic’, he reveals that further articulation of the categories is necessary if they are to qualify as the form of experience for all empirical objects.