Kant's Deduction and Apperception: Explaining the Categories

With Kant’s Deduction and Apperception: Explaining the Categories (KDA), Dennis Schulting has produced an erudite and ambitious study of the first step of the B-edition Transcendental Deduction. Key to Schulting’s reading is Kant’s claim in §19 that the categories, as «principles of the objective determination of all representations » are «all derived from the principle of the transcendental unity of apperception» (B142), and accordingly, the bulk of Schulting’s book is devoted to the task of elaborating Kant’s derivation of the categories from the I think. In spite of this narrow focus, Schulting manages to draw a number of conclusions of broader significance

for the interpretation of the aim and method of the Transcendental Deduction. Thus he rejects as false the dichotomy between understanding the aim of the deduction in addressing the skeptic as either regressive or progressive (since on Schulting’s reading it serves both purposes at once), and contends that acknowledging that the practice of writing Deduktionsschriften in the Holy Roman legal system constitutes an important part of the context for Kant’s Transcendental Deduction (as Henrich has shown) does not imply that it is not a deductive proof from concepts (as Schulting claims it is). As a result, readers interested in the detailed minutiae of the deduction as well as those interested in general issues confronting its interpretation will find something of interest in Schulting’s well-researched yet accessible volume.

– Prof. Corey Dyck, University of Western Ontario, Canada in Studi kantiani

Dennis Schulting has written a highly original book on that most scrutinized and controversial of philosophical arguments, Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. The book is tightly focused, tightly argued, and although it is often difficult it is also admirably clear. Schulting claims to find in the so-called first step of the Deduction a derivation of each of the twelve categories from a single principle, the formal ‘I think’ or the pure original unity of apperception.

– Dr. Andrew Stephenson, University of Oxford UK in Studi kantiani

Dennis Schulting’s monograph Kant’s Deduction and Apperception: Explaining the Categories (KDA) is a very impressive achievement. Difficult issues in the interpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding are relentlessly pursued with the aim of establishing the bold thesis that the categories can be derived directly from the principle of apperception. This thesis, which calls to mind Klaus Reich’s famous attempt to find such a derivation,1 is not very popular among Kant scholars, presumably because of the lack of clear indications in Kant’s text that this is what the metaphysical and transcendental deductions are about, and also because Reich’s book, despite its brilliance, failed to convince most readers that his proposed very complex derivation actually corresponded to Kant’s intentions. In this respect, Schulting is more convincing. Most of the steps he presents in his reconstruction of Kant’s deduction are possible to follow and not unreasonably far from the text. Since Kant’s B-Deduction is what it is, any interpretation of it is (on pain of incomprehensibility) bound to have recourse to extrinsic material and occasionally take some distance from the text, but KDA does so without ever losing contact with the actual content of the B-Deduction. Such is the force of the book that it alters one’s expectations of what the deduction should be taken to be about.

-Dr. Marcel Quarfood, Stockholm University, Sweden in Studi kantiani

DENNIS SCHULTING is former Assistant Professor of Metaphysics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has published on Kant and German Idealism and is co-editor of The Continuum Companion to Kant (2012) and the collection of essays Kant’s Idealism (2011)