Luciano Codato

Concerning Descartes and Kant, Michel Fichant and Jean Luc Marion claim that “when Kant thinks, Descartes still implicitly advances”. Yet, is a convergence among ontological theses (Heidegger) sufficient to nullify divergences among methodological grounds? To refuse the relationship of inherency "Descartes in Kant”, it is necessary to move from the standpoint of being to that of thinking, and observe in what sense words like “evidence” and “certainty”, once redefined by Kant, clarify the originality of the methodological problem of the Critique of Pure Reason.

In Kant’s logical texts the reference of the form S is P to an “unknown = x” is well known, but its understanding still remains controversial. Due to the universality of all concepts, the subject as much as the predicate is regarded as predicate of the x, which, in turn, is regarded as the subject of the judgment. In the CPR, this Kantian interpretation of the S-P relationship leads to the question about the relations between intuition and concept in judgment. In contrast to intuition, if no concept, due to its universality, refers immediately to an object, how should one understand the relations of S and P to one another, as well as their relations to intuition, which corresponds to the possible individuality of the object in general = x? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand Kant’s notion of extension, and to prove its irreducibility to the Port-Royal notion of extension as well as to the Fregean one.