Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-9knnw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-20T08:02:50.217Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Empirical Cognition in the Transcendental Deduction: Kant’s Starting Point and his Humean Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2016

Curtis Sommerlatte
Curtis Sommerlatte*
Affiliation:
Concordia University, Montréal
*
Email: curtis.sommerlatte@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, 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 (whether correctly or not), occurring through a capacity of forming judgements (whether correct or not). 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.

Keywords

cognitionTranscendental DeductionHumeclaritydistinctness

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 437 - 463
Copyright
© Kantian Review 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Allison, Henry E. (2004) Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. Revised and enlarged edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Allison, Henry E. (2015) Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, R. Lanier (2010) ‘The Introduction to the Critique: Framing the Question’. In Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 75–92.Google Scholar
Ameriks, Karl (1978) ‘Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument’. Kant-Studien, 69 (3), 273–287.Google Scholar
Ameriks, Karl (2000a) Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ameriks, Karl (2000b) Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumgarten, Alexander G. (2011) Metaphysica/Metaphysik: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, trans. Günter Gawlick und Lothar Kreimendahl. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog.Google Scholar
Beck, Lewis White (1969) Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Beiser, Frederick C. (2002) German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Jonathan (1966) Kant's Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Carl, Wolfgang (1989) ‘Kant's First Drafts of the Deduction of the Categories’. In Eckart Förster (ed.), Kant's Transcendental Deductions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 3–20.Google Scholar
Dicker, Georges (2004) Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dickerson, A. B. (2003) Kant on Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberhard, Johann A. (1766) Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens. Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß.Google Scholar
Edgar, Scott (2010) ‘The Explanatory Structure of the Transcendental Deduction and a Cognitive Interpretation of the First Critique ’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 40 (2), 285–314.Google Scholar
Engstrom, Stephen P. (1994) ‘The Transcendental Deduction and Skepticism’. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32 (3), 359–380.Google Scholar
George, Rolf (1981) ‘Kant's Sensationism’. Synthese, 47 (2), 229–255.Google Scholar
Guyer, Paul (1987) Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guyer, Paul (2010) ‘The Deduction of the Categories: The Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions’. In Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 118–150.Google Scholar
Guyer, Paul (2013) ‘A Declaration of Interdependence: Review of Kant's Thinker by Patricia Kitcher’. European Journal of Philosophy, 21 (3), 495–505.Google Scholar
Hanna, Robert (2006) Kant, Science, and Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Dieter (1976) Identität und Objektivität. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
Hogan, Desmond (2010) ‘Kant's Copernican Turn and the Rationalist Tradition’. In Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 21–40.Google Scholar
Hume, David (1751) Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding. 2nd edn. London: Printed for M. Cooper, at the Globe in Pater-noster Row.Google Scholar
Hume, David (1755) Philosophische Versuche über die Menschliche Erkenntniß: Als dessen vermischter Schriften Zweyter Theil. Nach der zweyten vermehrten Ausgabe aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit Anmerkungen des Herausgebers begleitet. Ed. Johann Georg Sulzer. Hamburg und Leipzig: Georg Christian Grund & Adam Heinrich Holle. [Reprinted in Heiner F. Klemme (ed.), Reception of the Scottish Enlightenment in Germany: Six Significant Translations, 1755–1782, vol. 1 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000)].Google Scholar
Jankowiak, Tim, and Watkins, Eric (2014) ‘Meat on the Bones: Kant’s Account of Cognition in the Anthropology Lectures’. In Alix Cohen (ed.), Kant's Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 57–75.Google Scholar
Kemp Smith, Norman (1918) A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'. London: Macmillan & Co.Google Scholar
Kitcher, Patricia (2011) Kant's Thinker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuehn, Manfred (2005) ‘The Reception of Hume in Germany’. In Peter Jones (ed.) The Reception of David Hume in Europe. London: Thoemmes Continuum), pp. 98–138.Google Scholar
Lambert, J. H. (1764) Neue Organon: oder Gedanken über die Erforschung und Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung vom Irrthum und Schein, vol. 1, Leipzig: Johann Wendler.Google Scholar
Leibniz, G. W. (1989) ‘Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas’. In Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (eds and trs), Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett), pp. 23–27.Google Scholar
Leibniz, G. W. (1996) New Essays on Human Understanding, Trans. and ed. Jonathan Bennett and Peter Remnant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Meier, Georg F. (1752) Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre. Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer.Google Scholar
Merritt, Melissa M. (2009) ‘Kant's Argument for the Apperception Principle’. European Journal of Philosophy, 19 (1), 59–84.Google Scholar
Paton, H. J. (1936) Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Schafer, Karl ( forthcoming) ‘Kant’s Conception of Cognition and our Knowledge of Things-in-Themselves’. In Nicholas Stang and Karl Schafer (eds), The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant’s Metaphysics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smit, Houston (2000) ‘Kant on Marks and the Immediacy of Intuition’. Philosophical Review, 109 (2), 235–266.Google Scholar
Sommerlatte, Curtis ( forthcoming) ‘Erkenntnis in Kant’s Logical Works’. In Violetta L. Waibel and Margit Ruffing (eds), Akten des 12. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses ‘Natur und Freiheit’ in Wien vom 21.–25. September 2015. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Van Cleve, James (2003) Problems from Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Watkins, Eric, and Willaschek, Marcus ( forthcoming) ‘Kant's Account of Cognition’. Journal of the History of Philosophy.Google Scholar
Wolff, Christian (2003) Vernünfftige Gedancken: von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag), (1751 edn; 1st publ. in 1720).Google Scholar
Wolff, Robert Paul (1960) ‘Kant's Debt to Hume Via Beattie’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 21 (1), 117–123.Google Scholar
Wolff, Robert Paul (1963) Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar