Abstract

Richard Aquila's study tackles a number of difficult and important issues in the Transcendental Deduction, issues that are frequently slighted. In recent decades, the fashion has been to read Kant as if his primary target were skepticism and his primary weapon "transcendental" arguments that turn on the meaning of certain key terms in our conceptual scheme. As Aquila notes, this cannot be the entire or essential story of the Transcendental Deduction, for it offers a theory of the formation of concepts. Rejecting current trends, Aquila explores some classic, but almost impenetrable, issues in the Deduction. What is the essential feature of intuitions? How are intuitions related to concepts? What is the role of the imagination in conceptualization? What is the object that corresponds to our knowledge? Among other topics, he also offers a plausible and clear interpretation of the Prolegomena's distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience.