Bringing representations to distinctness : German Rationalist method, the Critical Philosophy, and the case in the Appendix

• Main Author: Robertson, Helen Sarah
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2018
• Subjects: 100
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.756267

The so-called ‘amphiboly’ section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a section that has remained relatively understudied in commentaries and literature on the Critique. In this brief appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, Kant puts forward a charge against his German Rationalist heritage – the philosophical tradition of Leibniz, Wolf, Baumgarten – claiming for this heritage the error of an ‘amphiboly of the concepts of reflection’. When the precise nature of this charge is appreciated, it is possible to see that both the recognition of the error and the identifcation of its correction play a crucial role in the Critical philosophy itself. In this study, it is my aim to bring to light certain signifcant details of Kant’s case in the appendix and the crucial ways in which these play a subsequent role in the Critique itself. The study begins with an examination of the case in the appendix, focussing on what I take to be a crucial line of reasoning found in its introductory passages. Thereafter, the study divides broadly into two parts. In the frst part, I examine the line of reasoning insofar as it concerns a claimed error in the German Rationalist tradition. I show that the error is to be found in an implicit commitment in the frst stage of the German Rationalist method for philosophical cognition, the stage of bringing the representations of philosophy to distinctness, and show the line of reasoning in the appendix to constitute Kant’s Critical response to this commitment. In the later part of the study, I turn to the signifcance of the line of reasoning for the early parts of the Critique, in particular for the proofs of the Transcendental Aesthetic’s Metaphysical Exposition, showing these proofs to be the culmination of Kant’s corrected Critical method for bringing the representations of philosophy to distinctness.