Peter Suber, "Kant Questions and Explication Topics"

Reading Questions and Explication Topics
For Kant
Correlated with the Reading Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College
I've written these questions to help you focus on important issues in the reading. I may also use them in discussion, and you may find them helpful in thinking about paper topics. I've tried to keep each set of questions small enough so that you will actually consult them as you read.
The questions listed for a given day arise from that day's reading. The explication topics for a given day arise either from that day's reading or the previous day's reading.
"A" and "B" numbers refer to the first and second editions of Kant's Critique. You can find them in the margins of our book. This is the standard way of citing Kant's text. "WSP" numbers refer to the Werner S. Pluhar translation (Hackett Pub. Co., 1996), and "NKS" numbers refer to the Norman Kemp Smith translation (St. Martin's Press, Macmillan, 1929).
To make life easier, the syllabus has links to each day's questions.

Day 1. Table of Contents; Prefaces to first and second editions, A.vii-xxii, B.vii-xliv; WSP 5-40; NKS ix-xiii, 7-37

Questions to think about

What is revolutionary about Kant's 'revolutionary' idea?
What is Kant's notion of metaphysics?
Why is a critique of pure reason needed, and what is it supposed to do?
What is the positive and the negative value of critique?
Why will a critique of reason decide the question of the possibility of metaphysics?
How are Galileo's and Torricelli's experiments (B.xiif) examples of reason knowing only that which it produces after a plan of its own?
What are speculative and practical reason? How do they differ?
What does it mean (B.xvi) for objects to conform to our knowledge rather than vice versa?
Why would trespassing beyond the limits of experience destroy practical reason?
What differences do you notice between the prefaces to the first and second editions?

Day 2. Introduction, B.1-30; WSP 43-68; NKS 41-62

Thesis for explication

That a priori synthetic judgments are necessary for the possibility of experience.

Questions to think about

How do we know that experience and science are "actual" such that we can or must seek the conditions of their "possibility"?
How does a concept "contain a manifold" such that analysis can disclose it?
What are synthetic a priori judgements?

How are they possible?
Why are they important?

Why are causal judgments synthetic? Why are they a priori?

Would Hume agree that they are synthetic? that they are a priori?

Why is "7 + 5 = 12" synthetic?
Is the Critique a "canon" or an "organon"?

Day 3. Transcendental Aesthetic, Sections 1-5, B.33-49; WSP 71-87; NKS 65-76

Questions to think about

What is a transcendental aesthetic? (How is it transcendental? How is it an aesthetic?)
What is intuition?
What is the distinction between sensation and intuition?
What is the distinction between the matter and form of sensation?
What is the distinction between pure and empirical intuition?
Exactly what in intuition is a priori and what is a posteriori?
What is the distinction between intuitions and concepts?
Why are time and space intuitions rather than concepts?

Why are they pure (hence, a priori) rather than empirical (hence, a posteriori)?

What is the distinction between empirical reality and transcendental ideality (for time and space)?

How can time and space be both (empirically real and transcendentally ideal) without contradiction?
What is Kant's argument that time and space are empirically real? That they are transcendentally ideal?
Why are secondary qualities (like color) bad examples of transcendental ideality?

Is Kant saying that the entire world of space and all objects in space, and the entire world of time and all objects in time, are "just in my head"?
Is it true that in experience no question is ever asked about the thing in itself? (See B.45.)
How is Kant sure that the forms of time and space do not apply to things in themselves?

Day 4. Transcendental Aesthetic, Sections 6-8, B.49-73; WSP 87-104; NKS 76-92

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That time and space have empirical reality and transcendental ideality.
That the unknowability of things in themselves is necessary for the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments.

Questions to think about

Why are more objects in time than in space?
What are inner and outer sense?
What is the distinction between sensible and intellectual intuition?

Why is human intuition sensible rather than intellectual?
Why is God's knowledge intuitive rather than conceptual?

What is the distinction between appearance and illusion?
What is Kant's concept of a number?
How can physics make use of Kant's theory of time and space?
Why is there no privileged access to the self?
How does the Transcendental Aesthetic express or fulfill Kant's revolutionary hypothesis?
How is the Transcendental Aesthetic an organon?
Was the conflict of reason with itself, or any other source of error, found in the Aesthetic?

Day 5. Transcendental Logic, B.74-101; WSP 105-129; NKS 92-110

Questions to think about

Why are thoughts without content empty, and intuitions without concepts blind? What are "emptiness" and "blindness" here?
How does the distinction between intuitions and concepts explain the transition from the Aesthetic to the Logic?
Is Transcendental Logic a faculty? a science?
What is the distinction between pure and empirical concepts?
Why is there no sufficient and general criterion of truth?

Given this, what is the status of Kant's concern for truth? What is his notion of truth? In what sense does he claim truth for his results and in what sense not?

What is the distinction between analytic and dialectical logic?
What is the result of using general logic (which is a canon) as an organon?
What is the "clue" (NKS, GW) or "guide" (WSP) to the discovery of all pure concepts?
Why does Kant call the understanding an "absolute unity" (B.92)?
Why are concepts predicates?
What is the table of judgments? How does Kant arrive at it? Why is he sure it is accurate and complete?

Day 6. Analytic of Concepts, B.102-129; WSP 129-150; NKS 111-128

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That transcendental logic is not formal, but has content.
That pure concepts (can) apply a priori to objects.

Questions to think about

What is the relation between the table of judgments and the table of categories? Why does he need both? How did he get from the former to the latter?
How is the table of categories known to be complete?
How does the third category in each triad arise from the combination of the first two?
What are categories?
What is synthesis?
Are the structures of cognition shared by all rational beings? Are they subject to historical change or evolution?
What method has Kant used to learn the structures of cognition? How have these structures come to know themselves?
What is a transcendental deduction? What is its task? Why is it necessary to Kant's project?

Why do we need a transcendental deduction for pure concepts but not for pure intuitions?

How do we know that the categories apply a priori to objects?

Day 7. Transcendental Deduction in the A edition, A.95-130; WSP 150-174; NKS 129-150

Questions to think about

What is the central task or question of the transcendental deduction? (Part of the answer appeared in last week's reading, and part appears in this week's.)

Why is this task important to Kant's program in the Critique as you understand it so far?

How does the A version of the deduction meet the task of a deduction?

Drop out inessential detail and try to state the question Kant is trying to address and the answer provided by the deduction.

What is a priori and what is empirical in apperception?
How is the understanding a derivative faculty?
How does the understanding determine sensibility?
Is the transcendental unity of apperception the producer or the product of the categories? both? neither?
Why must Kant give his theories of consciousness and selfhood in order to accomplish the task of the deduction?

Day 8. Transcendental Deduction in the B edition, B.129-169; WSP 175-203; NKS 151-175

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That a unity of consciousness is required to ground the knowledge (or experience) of objects.
That unity of rules (concepts, categories) grounds the empirical unity of apperception.
That the transcendental unity of apperception is the ground of all concepts.
That empirical consciousness (and its unity) presuppose a transcendental consciousness (and its unity).

Questions to think about

How do the first and second editions of the deduction differ?
What is the distinction between empirical and transcendental apperception?
How does empirical consciousness presuppose pure consciousness?
How does the deduction set limits to the valid employment of the categories?
How can Kant know that no categories apply to noumena? Or, how can he know that their valid employment is limited to objects of experience?
What are the differences among the original unity of apperception and the other (derived) unities of apperception? How are they related to each other?

e.g. synthetic unity, analytic unity, objective unity, transcendental unity, subjective unity, empirical unity

How should we distinguish the I that thinks from the I that intuits itself?

Is there a further distinction between the I that intuits itself from the I that is intuited?

How should we distinguish judgments about objects valid only under my subjective (Humean) associations and habits from judgments valid for all, publicly, objectively?
How does Kant preserve the public, sharable character of knowledge? How does he avoid the conclusion that consciousness generates all there is? How does he avoid solipsism?
How are we the law-givers to nature?
How should we distinguish the unity of consciousness that is the same in each of us from the self that is different in each of us?
If the task of the deduction is to explain the applicability of the categories to objects of experience, then why does it focus so much on consciousness and its unity? How does the latter help explain the former?
What kinds of self are there? What is a human being?

If you're feeling especially courageous and adventuresome, here are some more specific questions:

Why does analysis presuppose synthesis more than, or rather than, vice versa?

Does this help us figure out how the analytic unity of apperception presupposes the synthetic unity of apperception? (B.133 and B.133.n.)

How is the necessary unity of apperception an analytic proposition that nevertheless reveals the necessity of synthesis?
How is the understanding "the faculty of apperception itself" (B.134.n), "nothing but the faculty of combining a priori" (B.135) "and of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception" (B.135)?
How is an object "that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is unified" (B.137), or "a determinate space" (B.138)?
How does the copula express the relation of subject and predicate "to original apperception" (B.142)?
How should we interpret the footnote at B.160-61? Is Kant saying that the Aesthetic depicted space one-sidedly as a mere form of intuition when in fact it is more than that? If so, then what correction or completion of the Aesthetic is he giving us here?
How should we interpret the footnote at B.162? Is Kant saying that imagination and understanding may be the same power of spontaneity under different names?
What is the role of imagination in the argument of the "A" deduction? Why is it missing from the "B" edition?

Day 9. Analytic of Principles, Schematism, B.169-187; WSP 204-219; NKS 176-187

Questions to think about

What is the distinction between concepts and principles?
What is the central task or question of the schematism? How is it similar to, and different from, the central task or question of the deduction? Why are both chapters necessary?
What is subsumption? Why is it a problem?
Why is time fitted to render concepts and intuitions "homogenous"?
How are schemata, images, and concepts to be distinguished?
Why do schemata, rather than images, underlie pure sensible concepts?
How do the schemata match or correspond to the categories?
How do the schemata simultaneously 'realize' and 'restrict' the application of the categories?
Are there schemata for empirical concepts, or only for pure concepts (categories)?
Now that you know what schemata are, how do we perform subsumption?
How do the principles match or correspond to the categories?
How do the principles provide rules for the objective employment of the categories?

Day 10. Analytic of Principles, Axioms and Anticipations, B.187-218; WSP 220-247; NKS 188-208

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That a schema is in one respect intellectual and in another sensible.
That a schema is necessary for a concept to stand in relation to an object.
That the possibility of experience gives objective reality to all our a priori modes of knowledge.
That all intuitions are extensive magnitudes.
That there is an a priori anticipation of something empirical and sensory.

Questions to think about

What are axioms of intuition?

How or why do they align with the categories of quantity?

What are anticipations of perception?

How or why do they align with the categories of quality?

What are intensive and extensive magnitudes?
Why are the axioms called "axioms"?
What is the highest principle of all analytic judgments?
What is the highest principle of all synthetic judgments?
What is Kant's theory of "self-evident" truths?
Why does pure mathematics apply to objects?
Does this account of mathematics (as based on principles) supplement or contradict the account given in the Aesthetic (as based on intuitions)?

Day 11. Analytic of Principles, Analogies, B.218-265; WSP 247-282; NKS 208-238

Questions to think about

Why are the analogies called "analogies"?
What is the difference between things in themselves and substance?
What prevents us from ordering things temporally in different ways?
What status does the principle of sufficient reason have for Kant? For example, is it empirically real and transcendentally ideal?
Are noumena subject to no causality at all, or to a non-standard type of causality?
In what sense did Kant prove, and not even try to prove, the analogies?
Do the analogies seem constitutive to you?

Day 12. Analytic of Principles, Postulates, B.265-294; WSP 283-302; NKS 239-256

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That changing appearances, and time itself, presuppose an unchanging substance.
That our subjective synthesis can be made objective only by a rule of causation.
That the analogies (taken together) indicate that all appearances lie in only one nature.
That not all a priori certainties are demonstrable.
That material idealism is false.

Questions to think about

Why does outer experience provide the basis of inner experience rather than vice versa?

Is Kant's claim that inner experience requires outer experience consistent with his position that outer sense is conditioned by inner sense?

How is it that consciousness of my existence is the immediate consciousness of the existence of other objects outside me?
What kind(s) of idealism has Kant refuted? What kind(s) does he endorse?

Why does the refutation of idealism occur in the middle of the postulates?
Why was it added in the B edition?

Have Kant's arguments for noumena already refuted material idealism?

If so, then why offer a new refutation appealing to external objects in space?
If not, then how can the appeal to external objects in space suffice where the appeal to noumena failed?

Kant says (B.282) that the reader should be able to align the a priori laws of nature with the categories. Can you?
Why don't the modal categories extend our knowledge? How does this principle undermine the ontological argument for God's existence?
What is the nature and basis of Kant's denial of ESP and other parapsychological phenomena?
How does Kant deny Berkeley's principle that esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived)?
If both blind chance and blind necessary are ruled out, then what is left? How should we characterize contingency?

Day 13. Phenomena and Noumena, B.294-315, B.346-349; WSP 303-322, 343-345; NKS 257-275, 294-296

Questions to think about

Is there a noumenal counterpart to every phenomenal object? (Are there noumenal "objects" at all?)
Do noumena cause or ground phenomena?

Are phenomena the appearances of noumena?

Does Kant's position on the unknowability of noumena allow him to know that there are noumena?
What is the difference between the positive and negative sense of noumena? Which does Kant use (most)?
Why does Kant posit things in themselves, exactly?
What price would he pay for omitting or denying them?

Day 14. Transcendental Dialectic, through Transcendental Ideas, B.349-396; WPS 346-379; NKS 297-326

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That the categories do not apply to noumena.
That the concept of a noumenon is a merely limiting concept whose function is to curb the pretensions of sensibility.
That the unity of reason is not the unity of a possible experience.
That the soul, world, and God are the only three (types of) transcendental ideas.

Questions to think about

What is the distinction between the immanent and the transcendental? between the transcendental and the transcendent?
What is transcendental illusion? What is the critique of transcendental illusion?
How is transcendental illusion different from empirical illusion? logical illusion? other forms of error?
When Kant says that transcendental illusion is natural and inevitable for reason, what kinds of remedy for this illusion has he ruled out and what kinds has he left himself?
Why is it important for Kant to distinguish reason and understanding? What is the distinction? (Is it finicky or fundamental?)

What does reason do that the understanding does not do? (There is more than one answer to this question. Start a list.)

Why do ethical questions begin to emerge as we move from understanding to reason?
What does Kant mean by condition, conditioned, unconditioned, and series of conditions?
Is it epistemically commendable or regrettable that reason should seek, for its conditioned knowledge, the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion? (See B.364.)
What is Kant's critique of Plato's theory of ideas?
How do the transcendental ideas match or correspond to the categories?

Day 15. Transcendental Dialectic, Antinomies, B.396-398, B.432-512; WSP 380-381, 442-501; NKS 327-328, 384-435

Questions to think about

What is an antinomy? How does it differ from an ordinary contradiction?
Why isn't skepticism a good response to the antinomies? That is, why not look at the thesis and antithesis, and especially at Kant's claim that each is a natural expression of reason, and conclude that we don't know what's true on these questions and must either resign ourselves to ignorance or keep looking?
What would it mean to "solve" an antinomy?

Can you anticipate what Kant will say in Sections VI (B.518, key to the solution) and VII (B.525, critical solution) of the Antinomies?

What price would we pay to leave the antinomies unsolved?
How do we know a priori that solutions exist?
In what sense are antinomies inevitable?

What does the inevitability of the antinomies reveal about reason?

What do the four theses have in common? the four antitheses?
What do the first two antinomies have in common? the second two?
What role does the unconditioned play in generating the antinomies?

Day 16. Transcendental Dialectic, Antinomies, B.513-585; WSP 502-551; NKS 436-484

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That there is an entirely natural antithetic of reason.
That there are are only four antinomies.
That human reason is by nature architectonic.
That freedom and natural necessity (through causation) can exist without conflict in one and the same action.

Questions to think about

How do the solutions to the mathematical antinomies differ from the solutions to the dynamical antinomies?
What is the role of skepticism in non-skeptical philosophy?
What is Kant's answer to Berkeley on the question whether things exist when they are not being perceived?
How does Kant allow us to conceive the passage of time (and the reality of past objects) prior to our own existence?
What is the importance of Kant's repeated claim that conditioned objects "set us a task"?
How does Kant resolve the conflict of reason with itself? Does he use reason?
How can reason "solve" its own antinomies? Why don't they disable reason from this kind of self-cure and ensure their own permanence?

Why isn't any rational solution a priori suspect?

Why would the arguments on both sides of each antinomy be well-grounded if appearances were things in themselves?
Why is the world neither finite nor infinite?
What is Kant's theory of freedom? How is freedom compatible with natural causality?

Why is the malicious liar at B.582-83 both causally determined and blameworthy? In what sense was the lie both conditioned and unconditioned? In what sense "could" and "should" the liar not have lied?

How does transcendental idealism (which Kant affirms at B.518ff) differ from material idealism (which he refuted at B.274ff)?

Day 17. Transcendental Dialectic, Ideal of Reason, Appendix, B.595-611, [B.611-70], B.670-732; WSP 560-572, [572-616], 617-662; NKS 485-495, [495-531], 532-570

Questions to think about

How seriously (or in what sense) does Kant intend the argument for the existence of God at B.599-608?

Is this one of the dialectical inferences leading to illusion?

How is Kant's theory of God similar to, and different from, his theory of noumena?
How is the unity of understanding a criterion for the truth of its rules?
Why is the regulative employment of reason necessary for reason, for understanding, for empirical knowledge, and for experience?
Why are regulative principles permissible when constitutive principles are not?
What is a heuristic as opposed to a regulative or constitutive idea?
Watch for Kant's repeated use of the "as if" construction. What is his epistemological point in saying that sometimes we may (or even should) see x as if it were y when in fact x is not y?

Day 18. Doctrine of Method, Discipline, B.735-825; WSP 663-727; NKS 573-630

Theses to explicate (pick one)

That transcendental ideas never allow of any constitutive employment.
That reason is needed for the proper employment of the understanding.
That logical law presupposes transcendental law.
That pure reason contains nothing but regulative principles.

Questions to think about

If today's reading marks the transition from the Doctrine of Elements to the Doctrine of Method, then how does it help us understand what Kant means by "method"?
How does Kant certify that his methods are reliable ones?
Why must philosophy and mathematics use different methods? How must they differ?
When Kant says "[t]here is thus no real antithetic of pure reason" (B.771) is he retracting or only qualifying an earlier set of claims?

Can you restate clearly and precisely the sense in which there is, and the sense in which there isn't, a natural antithetic of reason? Or the sense in which dialectical illusion is, and isn't, unavoidable for reason?

What is faith? Why is it legitimate when knowledge is not available? Is it ever illegitimate?
In exactly what sense does Kant accept the ideas of God and immortality? In what sense does he not accept them? What grounds and interests justify or impel him?
How seriously (or in what sense) does Kant intend his claim that without the critique of reason, reason could settle its claims only through war? What other passages suggest a socio-political dimension to Kant's theory of reason?
Why does practical reason have the right to postulate what speculative reason cannot prove?

Day 19. Doctrine of Method, Canon, Architectonic, History, B.825-84; WSP 730-774; NKS 630-669

No explication due today. But, in case you can't break the habit, try this one for your own benefit (not to hand in):

That practical reason has the right to postulate what speculative reason has no right to assume without sufficient proof.

Questions to think about

Why is ethics not part of transcendental philosophy?
How does the practical or moral employment of the principles of pure reason give them objective reality?
What kinds of freedom are we known to have and what kinds are we not known to have?
How can the same action be regarded as both free and determined?

Are all of our actions both free and determined in this way? Or are some of our actions unfree and "simply determined"?

What is Kant's moral argument for God and immortality?
Does Kant think an atheist can be moral? (Does Kant's moral argument for God make faith rationally permissible, or rationally obligatory?)
How has Kant united nature and freedom, or natural science and ethics, or speculative and practical reason?
What is the relationship that Kant envisions between his propaedeutic and his system?
What kind of metaphysics is Kant hoping to do, and what kind has he tried to kill off once and for all?
Why does Kant give such short shrift to the history of pure reason?

This file is an electronic hand-out for the course, Kant.