Dennis Schulting

In his argument for the possibility of knowledge of spatial objects, in the Transcendental Deduction of the B-version of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes a crucial distinction between space as “form of intuition” and space as “formal intuition.” The traditional interpretation regards the distinction between the two notions as reflecting a distinction between indeterminate space and determinations of space by the understanding, respectively. By contrast, a recent influential reading has argued that the two notions can be fused into one and that space as such is first generated by the understanding through an act of synthesis of the imagination. Against this reading, this article argues that a key characteristic of space as a form of intuition is its nonconceptual unity, which defines the properties of space and is as such necessarily independent of determination by the understanding through the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. The conceptual unity that the understanding prescribes to the manifold in intuition, by means of the categories, defines the formal intuition. Furthermore, this article argues that it is the sui generis, nonconceptual unity of space, when takenas a unity for the understanding by means of conceptual determination, that first enables geometric knowledge and knowledge of spatially located particulars.

In this book I focus on Hegel’s reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in his early account in Faith and Knowledge (1802). Up until now, accounts of this early work of Hegel have mostly dismissed it either as merely a youthful attempt or regarded it as at best an incomplete account of Hegel’s core philosophy (see e.g. Houlgate). Those who do take the work more seriously see it nonetheless as a work that fundamentally breaks with Kant (e.g. Düsing, Sedgwick). I will argue both that (1) Faith and Knowledge, in particular the section on Kant, shows Hegel already at his mature best and that (2) Hegel does not break with Kant, even though it is true that there are clear differences and Hegel pursues his own agenda. While the last chapter of the book outlines the connection between the themes of Faith and Knowledge and later mature work, especially the Science of Logic, the emphasis in the book will squarely lie on (2). More concretely, while it is true that in several respects his treatment is unfair to Kant, I argue that Hegel is an astute reader of Kant’s Deduction, and is able to identify the philosophical core issues in that famous argument. Through the prism of what I call ‘The Identity Thesis’ I explore three main themes in Hegel’s account, each corresponding to important steps in Kant’s deduction argument: the unifying role of the synthesis of the imagination in cognition (chapter 2), the place of space (chapter 3), and the idea of an intuitive intellect as contrasted with a discursive intellect (chapter 4). Hegel expresses The Identity Thesis most succinctly in his defence of Kant against Jacobi: "Kant brilliantly posits the a priori [ground] of sensibility in the original identity of unity and the manifold, which at the level where unity is completely immersed in the manifold, is transcendental imagination; and he posits the intellect in the raising of the a priori synthetic unity of sensibility into universality, so that this identity faces sensibility in a relative antithesis. Reason, in turn, becomes the higher level of the preceding relative antithesis, though only in such a way that this universality and infinity is pure formal infinity, and as such fixated. This is an authentically rational construction in which the misleading ‘faculties’ persist only in name; the truth is that Kant posits all of them in one identity." Hegel is the first reader of Kant who posits the Identity Thesis. In a nutshell: The Identity Thesis says that the faculty of understanding which unites representations by means of analytic unity on the conceptual level is the same faculty, through the ‘same function’, that unites representations by means of synthetic unity on the level of intuition. This is Kant’s claim in the so-called Leitfaden in the Metaphysical Deduction. This identity claim translates to the main question of the Transcendental Deduction where, in the so-called Second Step, it is argued that the function of synthesis responsible for the unification of intuition is that of the productive imagination and that the synthetic unity of representations is the way given manifolds in sensibility are united for cognition. The object as we conceive of it is the same object as we encounter it in sensibility. There is controversy in the Kant literature as to whether the identity that is expressed here is a reductive one or not. My claim is that, in Faith and Knowledge, Hegel provides good arguments for seeing the identity between the two functions, of conceiving of representations as unified and of intuiting them as such by means of the imagination, as a reductive one. The real function on the background -- Kant’s ‘same function’ -- that unites all representations, both conceptual and in intuition, is, when read properly, the synthetic unity of imagination, whereby the faculties of sensibility or intuition and understanding ‘persist’ as distinct ‘only in name’. ‘One and the same synthetic unity...is the principle of intuition and of the intellect’, as Hegel says. The faculties are as such derivative of that underlying synthetic unity. They are surface terms for what is in fact one. ‘The truth is that Kant posits all of them in one identity.’ Chapter 3 provides a novel interpretation of Hegel’s reading of Kant on space in Faith and Knowledge. In a notoriously difficult footnote in the B-Deduction Kant makes the confusing claim that the unity in sensibility (which is a synthetic unity) ‘presupposes a synthesis, which does not belong to the senses’ (B160–1n.). This appears to amount to a contradiction, but in a defence of Kant against Jacobi in Faith and Knowledge Hegel says that there is no such contradiction. Hegel talks about ‘Die Potenz des Versenktseins’ of the synthetic unity in the manifold which is compatible with the distinctions between form of intuition and formal intuition, and between sensibility and the understanding. Hegel’s idea of ‘Die Potenz des Versenktseins’ of synthetic unity is indicative of the epistemological primacy of the claims about the synthetic unity of space, which respects the sui generis metaphysical nature of space (and time) but at the same time emphasizes the unity of space simpliciter and the unity between space and the understanding in its function as the synthesis of imagination. Regarding the topic of the intuitive intellect, discussed in chapter 4 against the backdrop of the existing literature on the intuitive intellect, it is here that Hegel uses his analysis of the original synthetic unity to go beyond Kant’s restrictions with respect to intuitive intellects in §§16, 17, 21 of the B-Deduction, but only in a qualified sense (namely insofar as Kant’s idealism about objects is concerned). Taking a cue from a discussion in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Hegel argues that the intuitive intellect is in fact nothing but the transcendental imagination and its unity is nothing but the unity of the understanding. We should read this in the context of the analysis of the Identity Thesis. Hegel is not claiming some kind of cosmic or pre-discursive mind that produces objects out of itself and is in no need of sensibility. Hegel’s appeal to the intuitive intellect must primarily be seen in relation to his critique of Kant’s idealism, namely, that the identity of thought and object is just an identity for us, not between thinking and being itself, as it is on Hegel’s reading. Hegel thus disentangles the epistemic core of Kant’s insights from what he considers the metaphysical dead weight of subjective idealism.

This essay advances the thesis that, unlike what the majority of Kant scholars believe, Kant has a just war theory. In Towards Perpetual Peace and in the section Völkerrecht in the Rechtslehre, Kant formulates the legitimate grounds for waging a war against an unjust enemy. Strikingly, in a rather provocative footnote in Towards Perpetual Peace Kant seems to allow for the legality of anticipatory defence against an enemy neighbour that refuses to enter into a lawful relation. In this essay, I connect an account of Kant’s philosophy of history as developed in his Idea for a Universal History, according to which antagonism is postulated as the basic driving force of human history, to his theory, set forth in Towards Perpetual Peace, that states must seek to enter into a lawful relation with each other and must thus strive for peace, i.e. a law- governed arrangement where disputes are resolved by rightful means rather than by brute force. People must give up their ‘lawless’ ‘mad freedom’ for ‘rational freedom’ (8:354). If then for example an enemy neighbour is unwilling to relinquish their ‘mad freedom’ and has adopted a maxim by which ‘a state of nature would be perpetuated’ (Doctrine of Right, §60), a neighbouring state has the legitimate right to hinder this ‘hindrance of freedom’ by waging a defensive war against it. War is justified insofar, and only insofar, as it is consistent with the principle of freedom. [English translation]

In Chap. 4, I discuss the persisting spectre of phenomenalism. I consider two recent readings of Kant as a phenomenalist, in particular those by Lucy Allais and Emanuel Rutten. I believe Kant is indeed a phenomenalist, but I do not think his phenomenalism is a straightforward one, that is, amounting to the theory according to which objects are constructed out of sense data, a reading that goes back to H.A. Prichard. Allais dismisses phenomenalist readings of Kant’s idealism in all their varieties, but I provide several reasons for why we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I also show how an extreme phenomenalist interpretation of Kant, such as Rutten’s, fails to acknowledge Kant’s fundamental empirical realism about objects.

In Chap. 7, I reflect on the idea, hinted at by Kant in a footnote to §16 of the B-Deduction that is not often discussed (B134n.), that transcendental logic is the ground of logic as a whole. This has important repercussions for the way we should see the role of transcendental logic with respect to the question of truth as well as the nature and scope of transcendental logic in relation to cognition, and in relation to general or formal logic as such. To illustrate one of the ways in which transcendental logic is fundamental to our way of thinking, I address an issue that is brought up by Kant’s counterfactual claim at B132 that if a representation is not accompanied by an ‘I’ thought, it is ‘either impossible’ or at least ‘nothing for me’, suggesting to some recent commentators that by the former Kant means the impossibility of thinking contradictory thoughts. Unlike these commentators, I do not think Kant is saying here that we cannot think contradictory thoughts. To believe he is betrays a misunderstanding of the metaphysical nature of transcendental logic, or so I shall argue. It is because transcendental logic is a metaphysical logic that Kant can claim that transcendental logic grounds even the whole of logic, including the possibility of thinking contradictory thoughts.

In Chap. 9, I elucidate further my position on the two-step proof, and specifically what, in my view, it means for Kant to say that categories are necessarily instantiated in all of our determinative judgements solely in virtue of the act of transcendental apperception. In this context, I also address a related issue, namely, whether there can be cases of categorial illusion, cases for which it seems that the categories are instantiated in our judgements but where in fact categories turn out not to be instantiated. I argue that the idea of categorial illusion is based on a conflation of the necessary categorial application in Kant’s (transcendental) sense and cases of empirical illusion. It is therefore not something we should worry about. The exemplification of the categories in a determinative judgement about an object necessarily entails the exemplification of the categories in the object of judgement.

In Chap. 6, in the context of an expansive discussion of James Conant’s recent reading of the Deduction, I present my current, most detailed interpretation of the well-known Leitfaden passage at A79, which in my view has been misinterpreted by a host of prominent readers. The Leitfaden passage is crucial to understanding the argument of, not just the so-called Metaphysical Deduction, but also the Transcendental Deduction. This new account expands and improves upon the account of the Leitfaden I gave in earlier work. I also make clearer my position on why the unity of judgement, in which concepts and intuitions are a priori synthetically unified, is wholly determined in virtue of the unity of apperception as the unitary function of the understanding, without this leading to a strong form of conceptualism.

In Chap. 1, I introduce the theme of the book and delineate the content of the following chapters. One of the central themes of this book is the idea that transcendental logic and transcendental idealism go together, and that the logic of thought that is the ground of possible knowledge of objects entails epistemic humility about how the world is in itself. The humility is not a detachable add-on to the logic of possible knowledge, but follows directly from the conceivability thesis, namely the Strawsonian core idea that the self of experience and the object of experience are reciprocal elements of the same ‘limiting framework of all our thought about the world and experience of the world’, which dictates what we can conceivably know about objective reality. This shows what it means to be able to think about objects if we are able to think at all. Transcendental idealism is the framework from within which objects can be seen as in principle intelligible. It constitutes the bounds of transcendental logic.

In Chap. 5, I discuss grounds for seeing P.F. Strawson’s conceivability argument as compatible with a benign form of phenomenalism that shows our epistemic humility with respect to knowledge of things in themselves. I also address the often held, but mistaken belief that on Kant’s view things in themselves cannot be said to exist independently of our categorial determination. Such a belief betrays a misunderstanding of the function of the category of existence as a modal category which relates the subject of judgement to the thing that is judged about, as well as a conflation between the de re and de dicto senses of ‘existence’.

Chap. 2 can be seen as a capsule account of my interpretation of Kant’s argument in the Deduction and its relation to idealism, and thus serves as a good introduction to my general interpretative approach to that notorious difficult chapter of the Critique. As such, it forms a succinct preview of the more detailed arguments of the remainder of the book. In this chapter, I explain why for Kant self-consciousness is intimately related to objectivity, how this intimacy translates to real objects, what it means to make judgements about objects, and, importantly, what idealism has got to do with all of this. It thus shows why transcendental logic and transcendental idealism are really two sides of the same transcendental coin.

In Chap. 8, I revisit issues that have to do with Kant’s controversial claim that the table of categories is derived from a principle, which formed the basis for the account in my first book Kant’s Deduction From Apperception in which I made the case for the thesis that all of the twelve categories are derived from apperception, and can be shown to be so derived by closely looking at the arguments of §§16 and 17 of the B-Deduction. I rehearse several arguments that I presented in my earlier work and I provide additional textual evidence for why I think my approach, despite it being the minority reading, is the most straightforward one, and in fact the only one which can make sense of Kant’s central claims about the role of apperception in the deduction argument.

This essay advances the thesis that, unlike what the majority of Kant scholars believe, Kant has a just war theory. In Towards Perpetual Peace and in the section Völkerrecht in the Rechtslehre, Kant formulates the legitimate grounds for waging a war against an unjust enemy. Strikingly, in a rather provocative footnote in Towards Perpetual Peace Kant seems to allow for the legality of anticipatory defence against an enemy neighbour that refuses to enter into a lawful relation. In this essay, I connect an account of Kant’s philosophy of history as developed in his Idea for a Universal History, according to which antagonism is postulated as the basic driving force of human history, to his theory, set forth in Towards Perpetual Peace, that states must seek to enter into a lawful relation with each other and must thus strive for peace, i.e. a law- governed arrangement where disputes are resolved by rightful means rather than by brute force. People must give up their ‘lawless’ ‘mad freedom’ for ‘rational freedom’ (8:354). If then for example an enemy neighbour is unwilling to relinquish their ‘mad freedom’ and has adopted a maxim by which ‘a state of nature would be perpetuated’ (Doctrine of Right, §60), a neighbouring state has the legitimate right to hinder this ‘hindrance of freedom’ by waging a defensive war against it. War is justified insofar, and only insofar, as it is consistent with the principle of freedom. [revised German version downloadable here] UPDATED VERSION: a convoluted sentence in the last paragraph on page 3 has been corrected

In this paper, I reflect on the idea, hinted at by Kant in a footnote to §16 of the B- Deduction that is not often discussed (KrV B 134n.), that transcendental logic is the ground of logic as a whole. This has important repercussions for the way we should see the role of transcendental logic with respect to the question of truth as well as the nature and scope of transcendental logic in relation to cognition, and in relation to general or formal logic as such. To illustrate one of the ways in which transcendental logic is fundamental to our way of thinking, I address an issue that is brought up by Kant’’s counterfactual claim at B 132 that if a representation is not accompanied by an ‘‘I’’ thought, it is ‘‘either impossible’’ or at least ‘‘nothing for me’’, suggesting to some recent commentators that by the former Kant means the impossibility of thinking contradictory thoughts. Unlike these commentators, I do not think Kant is saying here that we cannot think contradictory thoughts. To believe he is betrays a misunderstanding of the metaphysical nature of transcendental logic, or so I shall argue. It is because transcen- dental logic is a metaphysical logic that Kant can claim that transcendental logic grounds even the whole of logic, including the possibility of thinking contradictory thoughts.

In this essay, I want to address two main aspects of the arguably central topic of Kant's treatise on Enlightenment, namely maturity: these concern the notion of the freedom of thought (Section I) and the idea of emancipation that is conveyed by maturity, the fact that it involves a process of growing up to become a citizen (Section II). Freedom of thought denotes the idea of self-agency which all human beings possess in principle whereas emancipation points to the fact that maturity is something that is not a matter of course, neither in individual cases nor for society at large. Maturity is not a natural disposition that one either possesses or not but must be developed. This means that not all human beings are de facto mature always, everywhere and all of the time. That this situation is not something that is in principle unalterable can be demonstrated by way of assessing Kant's apparent views on women's presumable minority 'according to sex'.

One of the most irritating habits of analytic philosophers when they show a passing interest in the work of philosophers from the past is the professed ignorance of textual and philological detail. This used to be worse than it is in current analytical philosophy. Many detailed scholarly readings that roughly can be categorised as belonging to the analytic school of philosophy are published now that show great care for exegesis and philosophical argument in equal measure. But wilful exegetical ignorance of historical philosophical texts is still ubiquitous among philosophers who technically don’t work in the history of philosophy. It’s often seen as a badge of honour to be merely interested in the philosophical argument that can be based on Kant, say, rather than in an exegesis of Kant’s text. This is often also portrayed in terms of the difference between offering Kantian style arguments and engaging in Kant scholarship. Kantianism is not the same as Kant scholarship, it is argued, and the former can be wholly detached from the latter, as if one could indeed judge what is Kantian without having studied Kant. One can of course legitimately pursue Kantian philosophy without at the same time engaging in Kant scholarship, but Kantian philosophy worthy of the name cannot not be informed by solid scholarship. ...