Journal of the History of Philosophy

Those familiar with the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) will not at all be surprised that Thomas C. Vinci has found it fitting to dedicate an entire book to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories (TD), a chapter of the CPR that is as important to Kant’s argument for Transcendental Idealism as it is difficult to decipher. The purpose of that section is to establish the objective validity of the categories—to show, that is, that the pure concepts of the understanding apply to all objects of human experience. While the general goal of the TD may be easy enough to state, the argument strategy that Kant uses to establish the objective validity of the categories is hardly easy to understand.

Vinci focuses on the argument strategy of the second (1787) edition TD, standardly referred to as the B-Deduction. This portion of the text replaced key sections of the first (1781) edition TD, and quite famously, Kant offers in the B-Deduction a two-part argument for the objective validity of the categories, the first of which concludes in section 20, and the second of which concludes in section 26. Based on Kant’s explicit remarks in sections 21 and 26, it has become standard practice to read the first part of the argument as establishing that the categories are objectively valid for all intuitions in general, and the second part as establishing that they are objectively valid for all empirical intuitions in [End Page 174] particular. Here, Vinci sees a problem. If Kant has already shown in sections 15–20 that the categories apply to all intuitions in general, then showing in sections 22–26 that they also apply to empirical intuitions is trivial: it merely establishes what immediately follows from the first part (196–200).

Vinci offers a reading of the two-part argument that is intended to circumvent this so-called Triviality Problem, and it is a reading that rests on a novel distinction between the “sensible intuitions” mentioned in the first part of Kant’s B-Deduction argument and the “empirical intuitions” referred to in the second part. According to Vinci, “sensible intuitions” refer to all human sensible intuitions in general, that is, to all intuitions that are presented in the pure forms of human intuition: space and time. “Empirical intuitions,” in contrast, refer to all spatio-temporally ordered intuitions that result from sensation. On this reading, the empirical intuitions of the second part of the argument are not a subset of the intuitions treated in the first part. Rather, they are sensible intuitions in a more narrow sense: they are the spatio-temporal intuitions peculiar to human sensory experience (200–202). Therefore, in going from the first part to the second part of his argument in the TD, Kant proceeds from a general notion of sensible intuitions to a more specific one, not from the genus “intuition” to a particular species. Vinci thereby gives us a way of seeing how the two parts of the B-Deduction argument are related, and a way of understanding why both parts are necessary for Kant to establish that the categories are objectively valid for all human experience.

Like any good provocative interpretation, Vinci’s is sure to raise questions, especially from scholars familiar with the B-Deduction. Such questions will likely come as no surprise to Vinci, who admits that his reading of the two-part argument rests on taking some creative license with the text and, specifically, on reading the notion of “sensible intuitions” in a way that runs “contrary to some of Kant’s official pronouncements” (202). This sort of creative license is not unique to the arguments of chapter 7. Earlier in the book, Vinci deploys distinctions—such as between pure and applied geometry, and logical and aesthetic unity—that are not explicitly made by Kant; and Vinci does so to make sense of some of the more puzzling claims that...