Day 9: Logic, Judgments, & Categories

•      Review: Sources of Knowledge

•      Logic

•      Judgments and categories

•      Transcendental Logic

•      Judgments and Categories

•      The Copernican Revolution

•      Read: CPR 151-160

Sources of Knowledge

•      CPR-B74: The two sources of knowledge are

    Sensibility – the capacity for receiving the impact of the world on the subject – and

    Understanding – the capacity for knowing an object by using that which is provided by the senses.

Sources of Knowledge

•      How are the two sources related?

•      “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (CPR-B75)

•       CPR-B87

Sources of Knowledge

•      CPR B-74: Receptivity and Spontaneity

•      CPR B-74-75: Both intuitions and concepts can be pure and empirical

Logic

•      Aesthetic: science of the rules of sensibility.

•      Logic: science of the rules of the understanding.

Logic

•      Logic can be general or specific

•      Specific: contains the rules for applications of the understanding to specific objects

•      General: can be divided into pure and applied (CPR-B77-79)

Logic

•      Pure General Logic: abstracts from all content of its subject matter, and does not deal with empirical principles

•      Applied General Logic: : deals with the necessary rules of the application of pure logic in concrete or psychologically real conditions

Transcendental Logic

•      Transcendental Logic:

          – What is it?

          – How is it related to other types/ parts   of logic?

Transcendental Logic

•      Transcendental Analytic: “That part of transcendental logic which deals with the elements of pure knowledge yielded by understanding, and the principles without which no object can be thought” (CPR-B87).

Transcendental Logic

•      Transcendental Dialectic: the critique of the hyperphysical (or hyperexperiential) employment of reason; the critique of “dialectical illusion” (CPR-B88).

•      Kant has some questionable views on the historical nature of dialectic (CPR-B85-86), so be careful about “dialectical illusion.”

Judgments and Categories

•      Transcendental analytic: a study of all a priori knowledge given by the (pure) understanding (CPR-B89)

•       4 conditions for the discovery of the fundamental concepts of the understanding

Judgments and Categories

•      A concept is a function of the understanding; it unifies or constructs a synthesis: “the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one [act of] knowledge.” (CPR-B103)

Judgments and Categories

•      Table of Judgments (CPR-B95) and the

•      Table of Categories (CPR-B106)

•      The kinds of Judgments are being used as a clue for the discovery of the kinds of categories

The Copernican Revolution

•      Kant thinks we need to justify the application of the categories; we need to demonstrate that they are conditions for the possibility of thought: CPR-B121 & B122-123.

•      In short, he wants to do for the categories (in the Transcendental Logic) something like what he tried to do for the forms of space and time (in the Transcendental Aesthetic); this is the next step in his Copernican Revolution