Kant and the Claims of Knowledge

Paul Guyer (Author)

9780521337724, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 December 1987

500 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.675 kg

This book offers a radically new account of the development and structure of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the defense of the objective validity of such categories as substance, causation, and independent existence. Paul Guyer makes far more extensive use than any other commentator of historical materials from the years leading up to the publication of the Critique and surrounding its revision, and he shows that the work which has come down to us is the result of some striking and only partially resolved theoretical tensions. Kant had originally intended to demonstrate the validity of the categories by exploiting what he called 'analogies of appearance' between the structure of self-knowledge and our knowledge of objects. The idea of a separate 'transcendental deduction', independent from the analysis of the necessary conditions of empirical judgements, arose only shortly before publication of the Critique in 1781, and distorted much of Kant's original inspiration. Part of what led Kant to present this deduction separately was his invention of a new pattern of argument - very different from the 'transcendental arguments' attributed by recent interpreters to Kant - depending on initial claims to necessary truth.

Acknowledgments
Notes on sources
Introduction
Part I. Kant's Early View: 1. The problem of objective validity
2. The transcendental theory of experience: 1774–1775
Part II. The Transcendental Deduction from 1781 to 1787: 3. The real premises of the deduction
4. The deduction from knowledge of objects
5. The deduction and aperception
Part III. The Principles of Empirical Knowledge: 6. The schematism and system of principles
7. Axioms and anticipations
8. The general principle of the analogies
9. The first analogy: substance
10. The second analogy: causation
11. The third analogy: interaction
Part IV. The Refutation of Idealism: 12. The problem, project, and promise of the refutation
13. The central arguments of the refutation
14. The metaphysics of the refutation
Part V. Transcendental Idealism: 15. Appearances and things in themselves
16. Transcendental idealism and the forms of intuition
17. Transcendental idealism and the theory of judgment
18. Transcendental idealism and the 'Antinomy of Pure Reason'
Afterword
Notes
General index.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]