In this article some problems associated with Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories will be examined. Kant wrote that the deduction was one of the most difficult and arduous investigations ever undertaken in metaphysics. It is the deduction that must establish the lawfulness of claims to knowledge on the part of pure reason and determine the very possibility of metaphysics.

Immanuel Kant left us not only fundamental treatises but also a wealth of remarkable or simply memorable expressions. Some of them—like the idea of the two things that fill the mind with wonder and awe, the starry heavens and the moral law—are known even to children. Kant's other aphorisms are not widely known. His manuscripts are a real depository of such little-known passages. Here are a few examples.

The philosophy of the modern age begins with two enigmatic figures—Descartes and Bacon. They are steeped in the common spirit of philosophical reform, but view the tasks and the place of metaphysics differently. Bacon thinks that metaphysics should be constructed on the basis of physics and has an applied and empirical character. Descartes believes that physics grows out of a priori metaphysics.