Craig Peterson

This dissertation investigates a central problem in categorial theory through an examination of Kant's and Hegel's categorial approaches to knowledge. The difficulty in categorial theory is not which concepts are categories but rather which principle justifies the objective connection between such concepts and objects in experience. While Kant and Hegel deal directly with this difficulty raised initially in Kant's so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy, a difference exists between Kant's analytic and Hegel's synthetic interpretations of experience. This difference represents two alternative ways of determining the link between categories and objects. ;Critical analysis of Kant's categorial view focuses on the form and function of the transcendental subject. In Kant's view, this principle has at least two roles, one being to establish a priori synthesis and the other to ground the architecture of his categorical framework. I investigate whether it can achieve both ends without unnecessary ambiguity. I find a tension between the transcendental subject's analytic conceptual form and the synthetic function by which Kant holds it to establish a priori synthesis. While the idea of a priori synthesis may be correct, Kant's concept of the transcendental subject inadequately articulates it. ;Hegel, in light of Kant's insight into the dependency of categories on a fundamentally synthetic principle, returns to the traditional categories of western epistemology. By demonstrating the necessity and universality of the Absolute idea from the inadequacy of theoretical frameworks ordered around concepts based on analytic form, Hegel establishes at least two points: the general inadequacy of analytic thought and the necessity and universality of a fundamentally synthetic principle to consistently articulate the objects in experience. ;Kant's analytic categorial framework and Hegel's synthetic categorial approach to knowledge represent two ways to connect concepts and objects. Kant introduces a notion of a priori synthesis but is unable to recognize its full implication for categorial frameworks based on analytic form. Rather, Hegel composes a fundamentally synthetic categorial framework, and, by demonstrating the synthetic link between thought and things, accomplishes an effective and consistent empiricism