In this paper, I aim to shed light on the use of transcendental deductions, within demonstrations of aspects of Wittgenstein's early semantics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics. I focus on two crucial claims introduced by Wittgenstein within these transcendental deductions, each identified in conversation with Desmond Lee in 1930-31. Specifically, the claims are of the logical independence of elementary propositions, and that infinity is a number. I show how these two, crucial claims are both demonstrated and subsequently deployed (...) by Wittgenstein within a series of transcendental deductions, a series which begins with extensionalism as a generalized condition of sense on propositions, and in the context of which are then derived various, further, significant and unobvious presuppositions generated by that generalized condition of sense. In addition to clearing up deductions of these two, aforementioned claims, I also elucidate deductions of the subsistence of objects, and of logical space as an infinite totality. (shrink)

In these comments, I share some remarks concerning two main points lying at the core of Gava’s book Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics: Gava’s reconstruction and account of a transcendental deduction, its relation to a metaphysical deduction, and more specifically his reading of the B-Deduction. I will discuss Gava’s arguments in order to highlight the key tenets of his interpretation and raise questions related to (1) the meaning and scope of the (...) notion of ‘transcendental’; and (2) the commitment to – and the extent of – what we might call ‘cognitive constructivism’. (shrink)

I argue for a novel, non-subjectivist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kant’s idealism is often interpreted as specifying how we must experience objects or how objects must appear to us. I argue to the contrary by appealing to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. Kant’s Deduction is the proof that the categories are not merely subjectively necessary conditions we need for our cognition, but objectively valid conditions necessary for objects to be appearances. My interpretation centres on two claims. First, (...) Kant’s method of self-knowledge consists in his determining what makes our cognitive faculty finite in contrast to God’s infinite cognitive faculty. Second, Kant’s limitation of our knowledge to appearances consists in his developing an account according to which appearances and our finite cognitive faculty are conceived of in terms of each other and in contrast to noumena in the positive sense and God’s infinite cognitive faculty. (shrink)

One of the principle aims of the B version of Kant’s transcendental deduction is to show how it is possible that the same “I think” can accompany all of my representations, which is a transcendental condition of the possibility of judgment. Contra interpreters such as A. Brook, I show that this “I think” is an a priori (reflected) self-consciousness; contra P. Keller, I show that this a priori self-consciousness is first and foremost a consciousness of one’s personal (...) identity from a first person point of view. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views (...) presented here, two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Major recent interpretations of Kant's first "critique" (wolff, Strawson, Bennett) have taken his transcendental deduction to be an argument from the fact of consciousness to the existence of an objective world. I argue that it is unclear such an argument can succeed and there are overwhelming reasons to believe kant understood his deduction as having a very different form, namely as moving from the premise that there is empirical knowledge to the conclusion that there are universally valid (...) pure categories. Detailed support for this contention is offered in an analysis of the second edition version of the deduction. (shrink)

From the second half of the last century, there has been a widespread view in the Anglophone world that Kant’s transcendental deduction (aka TD) aims to vindicate our common-sense view of the world as composed of public and objective particulars against some unqualified forms of skepticism. This widespread assumption has raised serious doubt not only about the success of TD but also about the very nature of its argument in both editions of the Critique. Yet, if there is (...) a connection between TD and global skepticism, the intriguing question is: Who is this skeptic? According to Strawson, “the skeptic” is a hypothesis of a purely sense-datum experience. In contrast, the fact that TD turns on the key notion of self-consciousness has induced several other scholars to assume that the skeptic is no none but a Cartesian external-world skeptic. None of those readings find textual support or are compatible with the very structure of the first Critique. The question is: Does this mean that TD aims only to undermine empiricism, as Guyer suggests? I do not believe so. I am pretty convinced that TD addresses a peculiar form of global skepticism, namely “Hume’s challenge to reason.” Assuming that we cognize (erkennen) and experience (erfahren) appearances as objects as a requirement of Newtonian physics, TD aims to provide a justification of the principle that nature is uniform that is superior to Hume’s justification. (shrink)

This is a monumental study of the transcendental deduction—that argument of legendary obscurity lying at the heart of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Allison begins from the methodological precept that “Kant’s argument can best be understood in light of the internal development of his thought”, and his book thus provides a systematic historical account of the deduction and its emergence from earlier texts. It begins with two chapters on the major pre-critical writings, which trace the emergence (...) of Kant’s “methodological” concerns with the limits and possibilities of metaphysical theorizing. However, this concern... (shrink)

Can sensibility, as our capacity to be sensibly presented with objects, be understood independently of the understanding, as the capacity to form judgments about those objects? It is a truism that for judgments to be empirical knowledge they must agree with what sensibility presents. Moreover, it is a familiar thought that objectivity involves absolute independence from intellectual acts. The author argues that together these thoughts motivate a common reading of Kant on which operations of sensibility are conceived as intelligible independently (...) of acts of the understanding, so that their supposed objectivity can validate judgments as empirical knowledge. He contends that there are two reasons why this epistemic compositionalism is implausible both as a reading of Kant and in itself. First, read compositionally, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is unable to fulfill its stated aim of showing that the categories are objectively valid, that is, exemplified by the objects that sensibility presents. Second, Kant sees that sensibility by itself cannot be understood to even purport to present objects, thus undermining the very intelligibility of compositionalism. The author argues that, given these challenges, Kant’s Deduction develops an alternative account, on which operations of sensibility and acts of the understanding can be understood only together. He contends that this epistemic hylomorphism transforms the familiar thought underlying compositionalism: objectivity simultaneously involves formal agreement with intellectual acts in general and material independence from any specific such act. He thus shows how Kant reconceives our conception of objectivity by overcoming compositionalism in favor of hylomorphism. (shrink)

Kant’s aim in the Transcendental Deduction is to prove that the a priori categories of the understanding necessarily apply to objects of experience. He claims that he will do this simply by explaining how they could so apply. But the idea that a mere explanation of this possibility should provide a defence of the categories’ actual (let alone necessary) applicability is surprising. We argue that it can be understood by attending to the source of the scepticism that the (...) Critique’s Analytic is supposed to overcome: Hume’s inability to explain causal knowledge in the Enquiry. (shrink)

I first criticize strawson's account of the transcendental deduction, And then argue that wittgenstein's considerations (in his later work) of the rule-Governed nature of judgment can be used to reconstruct a valid argument for a certain kind of objectivity, Which excludes solipsims. I suggest how kant's talk of synthesis can be reinterpreted in the light of this, As indeed can the doctrine of empirical realism and transcendental idealism.

In this book, Alison Laywine considers the mystery of the Transcendental Deduction in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. What is it supposed to accomplish and how? Laywine argues that Kant's peculiar adaptation of his early account of a world is the key to this mystery. Collecting evidence from the Critique and other writings by Kant--in order to identify what he took himself to be doing on his own terms--she holds that Kant deliberately adapted elements of his early (...) metaphysics both to set the agenda of the Deduction and to carry it out. Laywine highlights how the most important metaphysical element in Kant's thought was his early account of a world; a world is not just the sum-total of all substances created by God, but a whole unified by the universal laws of community prescribed by God that externally relate any given substance to all others. From this conception of a world, Kant then extracted a way to conceive key elements in the Deduction: experience as the whole of all possible appearances unified by the universal laws human understanding gives to nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant's Transcendental Deduction by Alison LaywineKatherine DunlopAlison Laywine. Kant's Transcendental Deduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. iv + 318. Hardback, $80.00.Alison Laywine's contribution to the rich literature on Kant's "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories" stands out for the novelty of its approach and conclusions. Laywine's declared "strategy" is "to compare and contrast" the Deduction with the Duisburg Nachlaß, an important (...) set of manuscript jottings from the 1770s (10). But her approach is also deeply informed by Kant's writings on metaphysics from the 1750s and 1760s; moreover, she gives attention to ancient Greek geometry and its importance for Kant's thought.I believe Laywine's most important interpretative claim is that the Transcendental Deduction's "final step" addresses "the question of how nature is possible" (210). Here, 'nature' is understood in what Kant calls the "formal sense," as "the totality of rules under which appearances must stand if they are to be thought as joined in one experience" (Prolegomena, §36; cf. B 165). This constitutes a novel answer to the problem posed in Dieter Henrich's landmark 1969 paper "The Proof Structure of the Transcendental Deduction" (Review of Metaphysics 22 [1969]: 640–59): how to understand §§21–26 of the (B-edition) Deduction as proving more than the thesis already stated in §20 (that the manifold in an intuition necessarily stands under the categories).Crucial support for Laywine's interpretation comes from §26 of the Deduction, which claims the possibility of cognizing objects "a priori through categories... as far as the laws of their combination are concerned, thus the possibility of as it were prescribing the law to nature and even making [nature] possible," is now "to be explained" (B 159). Kant does not use the term 'world' in this passage (as he does in Prolegomena §36). But Laywine contends that here the word 'nature' "has unmistakable, deliberate, cosmological connotations," and in fact "means 'world' in the sense of Kant's early cosmology": roughly, a whole unified by means of laws (12–13).The "cosmological" language of §26 does not recur in the following, officially concluding, section of the Deduction. So, we might ask whether Kant's explanation of how the understanding prescribes laws to nature is integral to the Deduction; Henry Allison, for instance, describes this explanation as an "appendix" (Kant's Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 9). The question of whether it belongs integrally has bite because, as Laywine makes clear in her "Conclusion," the universal laws at issue are just the Analogies of Experience. Thus, the passage could be read as the "promissory note with a forward-looking reference to the System of Principles" that she finds missing from the Deduction (289). Laywine meets such worries by arguing that "the reappropriation [from the pre-Critical period] of the general cosmology is actually [End Page 162] doing... a lot of hard work" in the Deduction (13). This sustained argument comes to a head in chapter 4, which contends that each of the two steps into which Laywine divides the first half of the (B-edition) Deduction, treated in chapters 2 and 3 (respectively), relies on cosmological presuppositions.Chapter 2 analyzes the conception of knowledge as relation to an object that is asserted (in §17) to rely on the synthetic unity of apperception. Laywine traces this conception to the Duisburg Nachlaß's account of "exposition," which relates concepts a priori to appearances, in something like the way that geometrical construction relates them to pure intuition. (Laywine further connects the Latin term expositio to the Greek ekthesis, which expositio translates in the context of geometrical proof. She thereby gives the notion of ekthesis broader importance than does Jaakko Hintikka, who noted its relevance to Kant's philosophy of mathematics in "Kant on the Mathematical Method" [Monist 51 (1967): 352–75]. Laywine claims that Borelli's edition of Euclid could have been Kant's source for the term, but I doubt it was known to Kant and his contemporaries, since it is not among the editions cited by Christian Wolff; Commandino seems likelier to me. Chapter 2 is concerned to articulate the notion of... (shrink)

In both "individuals" and "the bounds of sense" p f strawson has argued that the no-Ownership theory of mental states is incoherent. He has argued for example, That the no-Ownership theorist must use, In stating his theory, A concept the validity of which the theory attempts to deny (i.E., That experiences are necessarily owned). I show that this argument is based on a confusion of modalities, Mistaking "de dicto" for "de re" necessity. I further show that the very claim that (...) sets of experiences are identifiable only through reference to their "havers" is mistaken. Mental events are individuated and grouped together exactly as physical events are. I therefore conclude that a person "consists" of, "inter alia", Mental particulars; his thoughts are his in the same sense that his legs are his own. Siding with hume against kant, Strawson, And shoemaker, I argue that there are criteria for ascription of experience to persons and a person must use those criteria in ascribing experiences, Even current ones, To himself. Hence, A person who misapplies those criteria may be mistaken in believing of a certain experience that it is (or is not) his own. (shrink)

What is the relation between philosophical categories and everyday experience? Can an effectively first-person account of an historical experience rise to the level of a philosophical argument? This essay argues that Jean Amery’s account of his sufferings under the Nazis intends to generate a justificatory argument, a transcendental deduction of sorts, for the category of ”resentment’ against its philosophical critics, most importantly, Nietzsche.

I argue that §§15–20 of the B-Deduction contain two independent arguments for the applicability of a priori concepts, the first an argument from above, the second an argument from below. The core of the first argument is §16's explanation of our consciousness of subject-identity across self-attributions, while the focus of the second is §18's account of universality and necessity in our experience. I conclude that the B-Deduction comprises powerful strategies for establishing its intended conclusion, and that some assistance (...) from empirical psychology might well have produced a completely successful argument. (shrink)

One of the strongest motivations for conceptualist readings of Kant is the belief that the Transcendental Deduction is incompatible with nonconceptualism. In this article, I argue that this belief is simply false: the Deduction and nonconceptualism are compatible at both an exegetical and a philosophical level. Placing particular emphasis on the case of non-human animals, I discuss in detail how and why my reading diverges from those of Ginsborg, Allais, Gomes and others. I suggest ultimately that it (...) is only by embracing nonconceptualism that we can fully recognise the delicate calibration of the trap which the Critique sets for Hume. (shrink)

I discuss three elements of Dennis Schulting’s new book on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories. First, that Schulting gives a detailed account of the role of each individual category. Second, Schulting’s insistence that the categories nevertheless apply ‘en bloc’. Third, Schulting’s defence of Kant’s so-called reciprocity thesis that subjective unity of consciousness and objectivity in the sense of cognition’s objective purport are necessary conditions for the possibility of one another. I endorse (...) these fascinating but unfashionable claims and sketch my own version of what they amount to, which is quite different to Schulting’s own construal. I point to some fundamental limitations and problems for Schulting’s position and argue that his project needs to be reshaped or at least reconceived in the face of them. Even if Schulting’s argument is sound, it does not provide a deduction, properly speaking, of the categories. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that in the sense of greatest epistemological concern for Kant, empirical cognition is “rational sensory discrimination”: the identification or differentiation of sensory objects from each other, occurring through a capacity to become aware of and express judgments. With this account of empirical cognition, I show how the transcendental deduction of the first Critique is most plausibly read as having as its fundamental assumption the thesis that we have empirical cognition, and I provide evidence (...) that Kant understood Hume as granting this assumption. (shrink)

To understand Kant's transcendental deduction of categories we must distinguish between Kant's strategy foe constructing such a deduction and the manner in which this strategy is executed. I argue that both versions of the deduction contain similar strategies in which categories are identified with transcendental conditions of experience. Where the versions differ substantially is in the manner Kant executes the various stages of this strategy. It is pointed out, for instance, that in the objective (...) class='Hi'>deduction in A Kant introduces 'understanding' as a defined term (A119), whereas in B Kant postulates understanding as the fundamental activity of synthesis in terms of which he formulates the arguments of each stage of the deduction. Once the distinction between strategy and execution is accepted, much of Vaihinger's evidence for the "patchwork thesis" dissolves. But I also argue that in neither version of the deduction does Kant execute the identificatory strategy with convincing success. (shrink)

This article explores Immanuel Kant’s transcendental argument in philosophy. According to Kant, a transcendental argument begins with a compelling first premise about our thought, experience, knowledge, or practice, and then reasons to a conclusion that is a substantive and unobvious presupposition and necessary condition of the truth of this premise, or as he sometimes puts it, of the possibility of this premise’s being true. Transcendental arguments are typically directed against skepticism of some kind. For example, Kant’s (...) class='Hi'>Transcendental Deduction targets Humean skepticism about the applicability of a priori metaphysical concepts, and his Refutation of Idealism takes aim at skepticism about an external world. The article first considers the nature of transcendental arguments before analysing a number of specific transcendental arguments, including Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of Idealism. It also discusses contemporary arguments, such as those forwarded by P. F. Strawson and and Christine Korsgaard, together with their problems and prospects. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Sellars’ categories differ significantly from Kantian categories in two important ways. Kantian categories are pure and necessary, whereas Sellars’ categories are impure and contingent. This distinction explains why Sellars does not offer a transcendental deduction; such a deduction is only necessary for pure categories since experience cannot be used to prove their objective validity. Contrary to Sellars' intention to align analytic philosophy more closely with Kant, these differences also suggest that his theory of (...) categories represents a regression to Humean principles. (shrink)

I argue, contrary to Dennis Schulting inKant’s Radical Subjectivism, that the main reasoning of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is progressive, not regressive. Schulting is right, however, to emphasize that the deduction takes the object cognized to be constituted in an idealism-entailing way. But his reasoning has gaps and bypasses Kant’s most explicit deduction argument, independent of the Transcendental Aesthetic, for idealism. Finally, Schulting’s claim that Kantian discursivity itself requires idealism overlooks the fact that (...) Kantian general judgements can be true in a domain of objects without being specificallyofor about any particular ones of those objects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:189 HUME'S MORAL ONTOLOGY* My concern here is the claim, made in my recent book, that Hume is a moral realist. In general terms I would describe this book as one of several that represent a sustained effort to consider Hume within an eighteenth-century context, an effort to see him not as a timeless figure, or to treat him as a brilliantly successful contemporary of ourselves, but as a (...) brilliant eighteenth-century philosopher responding to eighteenth-century issues with, for all his timelessness, eighteenth-century conceptual tools and 2 from an eighteenth-century perspective. It would be hopelessly naive to suppose that any of us can view Hume without any historical distortion, but it is equally naive to read Hume, as he is often read, without historical sensitivity. Furthermore, such insensitivity closes us off from what is uniquely valuable about Hume, for, instead of seeing his writings as the consequence of his unique efforts to confront and answer the philosophical questions posed to him, the historically insensitive read into him their own questions and their own answers. The past studied as an echo of the present is of little interest (and none of that intrinsic), nor can there be much value in the study of those who saw but through a glass, darkly, the truths now so apparent to us. Our intellectual past is important to us because it is different from our intellectual present, and not because it seconds what we presume already to know. I was entirely serious, then, when I said that both the plausibility, and the very meaning of my claim that Hume is a common-sense moralist or a moral realist depends upon considering this claim — and, consequently, Hume — within a particular philosophical context. It will not do to suppose that moral realism 190 is a term with an eternal, unchanging, and Platonic connotation, and then to reject my suggestion outright because Hume was, as I would certainly agree, virtually without sympathy for anything revealing a tincture of Platonism. Philosophical terms as well as philosophical issues are historical, changing entities; it is those who think or act otherwise who smuggle 4 Platonism into the discussion. Doubtless, however, some of the misunderstanding to which I refer is my own responsibility. I can join Hume in saying "I have found by experience, that some of my expressions have not been so well chosen, as to guard against all 5 mistakes in the readers," and so I shall here offer some clarifications of my view. I. To begin, I wish to bring together in one place evidence of the significant qualifications I put on my claim about Hume's moral realism. Taken together, these remarks show that my position is consistent with the widely held (and generally correct, I would say) view that Hume is in one highly important sense a naturalist, and that I ascribe to him a realism that is neither Platonic, Scholastic, Cartesian, nor Hutchesonian: A. If naturalism is thought to be the view "that the whole of the universe or experience may be accounted for by a method like that of the physical sciences," then Hume must certainly be called a naturalist because of his efforts to extend the "experimental Method of Reasoning into moral Subjects".... Hume is a naturalist in that he sought to produce coherent philosophical explanations without the slightest recourse to supernatural entities or transcendental principles... an obvious example of this kind of naturalism... is his attempt to explain moral values as derived from human nature or from, that is, human beings as constituted and active in the world (DH 15-16). 191 B. By no stretch of the imagination can Hume be supposed to have borrowed this providential aspect of Hutcheson's thought, not even in morals (DH 54; also see p. 93). C I submit that /Hume/ holds that vice and disapprobation are not identical and that moral qualities are not merely sentiments but, rather, the objective correlates of sentiments. /Footnote:/ No rash conclusions should be drawn from this claim about objective correlates. I do not suggest that virtue and vice are objects in the ordinary sense (physical objects), or that they are transcendently existing qualities of... (shrink)

In this chapter, the author shows how certain deep points about temporal experience drive both versions of Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories – a transcendental argument that he called a “Deduction” not because of its deductive structure but because in German the term “Deduktion” had a legal meaning signifying establishment of the right or title to something, in this case the right to apply Kant's categorical concepts – and their sequel in the Analogies of Experience. (...) The author also discusses Kant's “Refutation of Idealism,” a famous transcendental argument in which time also plays a key role. Kant produced two versions of his Transcendental Deduction, one for the First Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (“the A‐Deduction”) and one for the Second Edition (“the B‐Deduction”). The author also presents responses to the Stroudean objection to these transcendental arguments. (shrink)

The problem of Kant’s Neglected Alternative is that while his Aesthetic provides an argument that space and time are empirically real – in applying to all appearances – its argument seems to fall short of the conclusion that space and time are transcendentally ideal, in not applying to any things in themselves. By considering an overlooked passage in which Kant explains why his Transcendental Deduction is ‘unavoidably necessary’, I argue that it is not solely in his Aesthetic but (...) more so in his Deduction where he intends to provide his argument for the transcendental ideality of space and time. His Deduction shows that space and time do not have a valid application to any things in themselves by arguing that the categories do have a valid application to everything in space and time, but that the categories do not have a valid application to any things in themselves. (shrink)

A Kantian transcendental argument is an argument which purports to show that the existence of physical objects of a certain general character is a condition for the possibility of self-conscious experience. Both the Transcendental Deduction and the Refutation of Idealism satisfy this characterization. But we have seen that even a successful Kantian transcendental argument would be somewhat disappointing. Even though such an argument would refute the extreme Cartesian skepticism about the very existence of physical objects, it (...) would not certify any of one's claims to know facts about particular physical objects: it would not refute the weaker skeptical position I have sketched.5 How- ever, it would clearly be of great interest if one could show that the existence of physical objects is a condition for the possibility of self- conscious experience. Accordingly, I would like to investigate some problems surrounding the construction of Kantian transcendental arguments. (shrink)

his paper explores the relationship between Kant’s views on the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian mathematical physics and his more general transcendental philosophy articulated in the Critique of pure reason. I argue that the relationship between the two positions is very close indeed and, in particular, that taking this relationship seriously can shed new light on the structure of the transcendental deduction of the categories as expounded in the second edition of the Critique.Author Keywords: Kant; Mathematical physics; (...) class='Hi'>Transcendental deduction. (shrink)

A puzzle arises when we consider that, for Kant, the categories are 'original acquisitions' of our understanding to which we must nevertheless prove our entitlement via 'deduction', on pain of dogmatism. I resolve this puzzle by articulating skepticism’s role in the transcendental deduction, drawing on Kant’s construal of the skeptical 'question quid juris' in the juridical terms of entitlement to property. I then situate skepticism’s transformative potential within what Kant regards as reason’s 'maturation' from dogmatism toward self-knowledge. (...) Finally, I contrast Hegel’s account of spirit’s progress toward 'absolute knowledge', which shifts both the mode of skepticism and the prospect of maturation. (shrink)

Kantian transcendental arguments are aimed at uncovering the necessary conditions for the possibility of thought and experience. If such arguments are to have any force against Cartesian skepticism about knowledge of the external world, then it would seem that the conditions the transcendental argument uncovers must be non-psychological in nature, and their special status must be knowable a priori. In "Transcendental Arguments", Barry Stroud raised the question whether there are any such conditions., He answered that it was (...) very doubtful that one could argue deductively from the premise that there is thought and experience to the conclusion that certain conditions concerning non-psychological, external reality are satisfied. In the intervening 27 years, no one has decisively answered those doubts. No one has succeeded in constructing a convincing Kantian anti- skeptical transcendental argument of the desired kind. In a recent paper, however, Stroud has suggested that things might well be looking up a bit for the transcendental arguer. Stroud now holds that there is a modest variant of the ambitious Kantian anti-skeptical strategy that offers the promise of an answer of sorts to the skeptic that is free of various objectionable Kantian excesses. In this paper, I will describe the more modest sort of transcendental argument that Stroud finds promising, and I will then raise some doubts about the prospects of this modest approach. (shrink)

The subject of this article is a powerful objection to the non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. Part of the purpose of the deduction is to refute the sort of scepticism according to which there are no objects of empirical intuition that instantiate the categories. But if the non-conceptualist interpretation is correct, it does not follow from what Kant is arguing in the transcendental deduction that this sort of scepticism is false. This (...) article explains and assesses a number of possible responses to this objection. (shrink)

Many interpretations of Kant’s first Critique fail to appreciate the revolutionary nature of his account of knowledge and its implications for skepticism, givenness and mind-independence, because they read Kant as holding a compositional account of knowledge. I contend that the reason for this is that this account is both naturally appealing in its own right, and fits an influential reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. On this reading, the Deduction aims to respond to a skeptical worry which issues (...) from the empiricist version of epistemic compositionalism and which questions the intelligibility of the claim to knowledge of our judgements. Against this, I argue that what Kant’s Deduction actually aims to address is a radicalization of this epistemic worry, which instead questions the intelligibility of the objective purport of our judgements. I contend that the compositional account is unable to respond to this more radical worry, thereby putting it into question both as a reading of Kant, and as an account of knowledge generally. To corroborate this, I provide a reading of the Deduction that overcomes epistemic compositionalism by thinking through its shortcomings in order to arrive at a more adequate successor account: the hylomorphic account of knowledge, which, I contend, is able to dissolve both the more radical and the epistemic worry. I suggest that this implies generally that the epistemic worry issuing from the compositional account is not self-contained, but must give way to Kant’s more radical worry, which I argue can only be addressed within the underappreciated framework of epistemic hylomorphism. (shrink)