An Outline Introductory to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to the discovery of the Categories. The Categories may be defined as forms of judgment involved in experience of the relation between objects. THE DISCOVERY OF THE CATEGORIES. Here we at once come upon traces of Kant's early training in Wolffianism. He is seeking for what he calls functions of unity. That is to say, he addresses himself to the task of discovering the modes whereby things are put together in course of the elaboration y experience. The faculty that enables man thus to function is termed Judgment. Now Judgment is oneoT the three main divisions into which the field of Formal Logic is divided. Accordingly, Kant very naturally thought that the analogy from Logic, which held in the Esthetic, would be equally serviceable in the Analytic. Simple apprehension, or the knowing of single concepts, takes place under the conditions of time; so it might be supposed that the particular relations between objects would be likely to take place, in the same way, under the forms of Judgment usually set forth by Logic. These forms of Judgment, then, Kant assumes. He does not discover them in any proper sense or this term, he merely adopts them much as he findr, them. This was a tendency due in large part to his previous training. Later thinkeiB, who have shaken themselves free from the superstition of Formal Logic, thanks very largely to Kant 3 own work, commonly view this procedure as a n, ost unfortunate error. It is true that a search for functions of unity has been instituted; it is also true that Judgment is a unifying faculty. But it is not similarly true that we are looking for bare forms of unity. Now Kant thought that the forms of Judgment would afford him a satisfactory enumeration of the a priori syntheses involved in the relations which the living min...