Diane Mayer

Part One is essentially negative. It rejects various forms of factical reading, but justifies the epistemic reading primarily as a plausible alternative. Part Two argues that the epistemic reading is not only plausible but genuinely Kantian. Chapter IV provides a fairly detailed account of certain central Kantian arguments in the Analytic. Kant's argument is held to be based on the essential nature of knowledge and consciousness. I argue that the same epistemic exigencies ground both versions of the deduction, and that these same necessities lie behind the argument in the Principles. In Chapter VI round out the account of transcendental philosophy by showing the implications of Kant's arguments for the interpretation of the Critique and the way in which the epistemic reading makes sense of Kant's treatment of necessity and freedom. ;In Part One, the factical interpretation of Kant's central claims is shown to fail because it generates textual and conceptual contradictions and ultimately is denied by Kant himself. Chapter I sets up the distinction between factical and epistemic interpretations and presents the tools and themes to be taken up in the following chapters. Chapter II argues against treating 'appearance' as a type of being and Chapter III argues against treating knowing as a kind of making. In Chapter II, appearance is interpreted as an epistemic category. This interpretation is held to avoid factically grounded problems and to make philosophical sense of the text. It is also held to correspond to Kant's own usage. In particular, I argue that Kant's treatment of the philosophical tradition in the Amphiboly and Dialetic amounts to a rejection of any attempt to ground epistemology on ontology. In Chapter III, the relation of thought to being is given an epistemic interpretation. I argue that 'a priori' is, for Kant, an epistemic concept and that factical readings of it generate serious problems. In particular, they provide no way for us to discriminate the a priori and the a posteriori. ;My thesis is two-fold: Kant's philosophy is epistemic; consequently, his central arguments and categories are epistemic and must be so read; factical readings therefore fail, or can be expected to fail. The justification of the claims has two parts. ;This dissertation attempts to establish the nature of Kant's transcendental philosophy. To do so, I take the critical claim that "objects must conform to our knowledge" as a clue to the interpretation of the Critique. This doctrine leads naturally to the view that what-is is to be interpreted in terms of knowledge. Consequently, the basic elements of Kant's arguments ought to have an epistemic, not an ontological value. Moreover, the arguments themselves ought to proceed from an analysis of the essential character of knowledge. Such a philosophical approach I call 'epistemic,' and an interpretation that holds Kant to argue in this fashion is correspondingly an 'epistemic interpretation.' The alternative reading I call 'factical.' On it, the basic elements have an ontological import, and Kant argues to the possibility of knowledge on the basis of a prior doctrine of being. Such readings may bring the Critique out of the sphere of philosophy altogether, by attributing quasi-empirical claims to Kant; for example, that the mind is a kind of thing that literally imposes structure of certain other things, known as sense data. On the other hand, they may give the Critique a philosophical location, while holding Kant's epistemology to be grounded on an ontology