Kants Categories Reconsidered Essay -- Philosophy Philosophical Paper

Kants Categories Re distributeedABSTRACT Adopting a Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, I consider the question of the ontological commitment of Kants theory of our a priori knowledge of objects. Its send concern is the customary view that the ontology of Kants theory of knowledge in general, whether a priori or empirical, must be pattern in terms of the a priori conditions or representations of space, time, and the categories. Accordingly, this view is accompanied by the customary interpretation of ontology as consisting of Kantian appearances or empirical objects. I argue against this view and interpretation. My contrast turns on the opposition between the necessity and universality of the a priori and the speciality and contingency of the existent. Its main point is that the a priori can remain necessity and universal only if the existence of objects is kept distinct from it. I. IntroductionTo the finale that category theory, i.e. that there are certain predicates o f things that are fundamental to our thought about objects in general, has been based on our thought of objects of possible experience, it has been extremely suspect. This is the negative thesis of this paper. Over the years, philosophical inventiveness has produced various schemes of predicates which take exception the claims of necessity that have been made on behalf of the scheme we employ for much(prenominal) objects-a scheme of substances that are involved in causal action and interaction. If no particular scheme is necessary, perhaps it is not necessary that we employ both scheme at all.Kants theory of categories is no different from any new(prenominal) category theory in this regard. Its dependence on what Kant calls the logical functions of creative thinker do... ...scussion. For an actual development of the proposal see Robert Greenberg, The Content of Kants Logical Functions of Judgment, chronicle of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (1994) 375-92.(7) This interpretation of transcendental content seems to contend that given by Darrell Johnson, viz., that it refers to the concept of an object in general. See his, Kants metaphysical Deduction, Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress (Milwaukee Marquette University Press, 1995) Volume II, Part I, p 273. (8) The by now widely accepted division of the B-Deduction into two stairs was first introduced into the current commentary on the deduction by Dieter Henrich in his, The Proof Structure of Kants Transcendental Deduction, Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969) 640-59, reprinted in Ralph C. S. Walker, ed. Kant on Pure Reason (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1982).