Kants Categories Reconsidered Essay -- Philosophy Philosophical Paper

Kants Categories ReconsideredABSTRACT Adopting a Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, I consider the foreland of the ontological commitment of Kants theory of our a priori knowledge of objects. Its direct tint is the customary view that the ontology of Kants theory of knowledge in general, whether a priori or empirical, must be thought 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 argument turns on the opposition between the need and widely distributedity of the a priori and the particular propositionity and contingence of the existent. Its main point is that the a priori can remain necessary and universal only if the existence of objects is kept distinct from it. I. IntroductionTo the extent that folk theory, i.e. that there are certain p redicates of things that are fundamental to our thought nearly objects in general, has been based on our thought of objects of possible experience, it has been highly suspect. This is the banish thesis of this paper. Over the years, philosophical inventiveness has produced various intrigues of predicates which challenge the claims of necessity that have been made on behalf of the organization we employ for such 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 any scheme at all.Kants theory of categories is no different from any other category theory in this regard. Its dependence on what Kant calls the logical functions of judgment do... ...scussion. For an actual development of the proposal see Robert Greenberg, The Content of Kants Logical Functions of Judgment, History of philosophical system Quarterly 11 (1994) 375-92.(7) This interpretation of transcendenta l content seems to dispute that tending(p) by Darrell Johnson, viz., that it refers to the concept of an object in general. See his, Kants Metaphysical Deduction, transactions 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 steps was number 1 introduced into the current commentary on the deduction by Dieter Henrich in his, The validation Structure of Kants Transcendental Deduction, Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969) 640-59, reprinted in Ralph C. S. Walker, ed. Kant on stark(a) Reason (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1982).