Jennifer Mensch

This dissertation describes the development of Kant's transcendental idealism starting with the 1770 Inaugural Dissertation and continuing through to the 1787 second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. My central argument is that transcendental idealism develops in response to the question concerning the relation between concepts and objects. In making this point I examine the emphasis placed on sense in the Dissertation, an emphasis demanding Kant's rejection of intellectual intuition, before moving to a discussion of Kant's famous letter to Marcus Herz. While the problem was thus exposed as early as 1772 it is only in 1781 that Kant is able to present his "Copernican revolution" in philosophy as the definitive solution. The second half of this study traces out the consequences of Kant's solution, specifically with respect to the charge of a Berkeleyan idealism.

This paper examines one of the central complaints regarding Locke’s Essay, namely, its supposed incoherence. The question is whether Locke can successfully maintain a materialistic conception of matter, while advancing a theory of knowledge that will constrain the possibilities for a cognitive accessto matter from the start. In approaching this question I concentrate on Locke’s account of unity. While material unity can be described in relation to Locke’s account of substance, real essence, and nominal essence, a separate discussion will be called for altogether in the case of organic unity. In closing, I turn to Kant as a model for locating Locke’s purported incoherence, suggesting that his “skeptical idealism” yields the same epistemic advantages as those won by Kant’s “empirical realism.”

Focusing on the account of synthesis in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction allows us to see a greater degree of compatibility between the two editions of theCritique of Pure Reason than is sometimes thought. The first Deduction shows that while it emphasizes an account of empirical synthesis it also includes a more properly transcendental account of the synthetic unity required for cognition. The second edition simply focuses on this feature of synthesis to the exclusion of the empirical. The result: a complete account of synthesis with the A-edition starting “bottom up” from sense and the B-edition working “top-down” from thought.