"Analytic philosophy has leveled many challenges to Kant's ascription of necessary properties and relations to objects in his Critique of Pure Reason. Some of these challenges can be answered, it is argued here, largely in terms of techniques belonging to analytic philosophy itself, in particular, to its philosophy of language. This Kantian response is the primary objective of this book. It takes the form of a compromise between the real existence of the objects that we can intuit and that get (...) our knowledge started - dubbed initiators - and the ideality of the necessary properties and relations that Kant ascribes to our sensible representations of initiators, which he entitles appearances. Whereas the real existence of initiators is independent of us and our senses, the necessity of these properties and relations of appearances is due to their origins in the mind."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Kant’s epistemological reorientation of ontology, explaining in what sense Kant’s complex theory of transcendental idealism and empirical realism should be understood as an ontological realism under the framework of epistemological idealism. The paper shows that Kant’s concept of existence is only applicable to empirical objects in the spatiotemporal causal framework. Accordingly, not only things in themselves, but also epistemic conditions such as the transcendental subject and the faculties of sensibility and understanding cannot be said to exist. They (...) are theoretical constructs in the transcendental discourse to account for the normative conditions of objective cognition and reality. (shrink)

This paper develops a new functionalist interpretation of Kant that aims to unify his cognitive psychology with transcendental idealism. It argues that Kant’s faculty of cognition describes neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal mind, but a theoretical construct of the transcendental subject, comparable to the abstract Turing machine. This interpretation can be called “transcendental functionalism,” which determines what functions the mind has to realize if it is to be capable of objective cognition. Transcendental functionalism resolves problems associated with other functionalist (...) interpretations of Kant by drawing a systematic distinction between transcendental cognitive functions and their empirical realizations. While transcendental functions stipulate abstract conceptual requirements, their empirical counterparts realize the functional constraints in appearances within the spatiotemporal and causal framework. This distinction also allows a better explanation of why Kant abandoned the subjective deduction of categories in the B-deduction. (shrink)

So we stand more or less on our own when trying to make sense of a specifically transcendental way of argumentation. Fortunately we are not all that alone, since independently of a direct Kantian influence the problem of transcendental arguments has stimulated a considerable debate among analytical philosophers. And we still have Kant’s own text. We shall start, therefore, by reminding ourselves of this debate and then go back to Kant. We shall deliberately not proceed the other way round in (...) order to avoid as much as possible what one may call a Kantian bias. The representatives chosen for analytical philosophy are Wittgenstein, Quine, and Strawson. We shall then consider the Kantian account of the meaning of the term "transcendental". After this preparation we are in a position to examine the claim of a ‘transcendental deduction,’ which is one of the most controversial issues arising from the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)