The Growth of Kant's Transcendental Deduction of Categories

This paper intends to contribute to the historical study of the 'silent decade' of Kant. This period began with the Dissertation which asserted the cognizability of things in themselves by means of pure intellectual concepts; it ended in the first Critique which denied that cognizability completely. Both treatises, however, have in common the idealist coception of space and time. To elucidate the significance of transcendental deduction, to show the genetic situation of the problem and to reconstruct the nascent form of its solution, in so far as the reliable documents (Kant's Nachlass) admit, is my concern. My main arguments run as follows. 1) The deduction-problem was firstly motivated by Lambert's criticism of Kant, as Prof. Vleeschauwer has beautifully shown. In order to apologize himself as a genuine realist, Kant was necessitated to seek after the denolalum of pure intellectual concepts. We can understand this Kan's problem as a sort of transcendental semantics. 2) A clue to the solution of the problem was gained by his reducing the possibility of correspondence between idea and reality to that of the synthetic unity of subject and predicate. I tried to show that the question of the possibility of synthetic proposition was intrinsically interwoven with the question about the semantical validity of pure concepts from the outset. (Almost all upholders of the so-called patch-work theory, including Vleeschauwer, have denied this inseparability of the two forms of the problem, and looked on the question, “How is the synthetic proposition a priori possible ?”, merely as a frame extraneously added to Kant's architecture.) 3) The metaphysical synthetic proposition is to be interpreted as that proposition in which the suject is a pure concept and the predicate is a time-determination as its denotatum. The kernel of the original deduction might well be termed as ‘the construction of a pure concept in regard with time'. The central issue of deduction was in fact first achieved, as the proof of the “Analogie der Erfahrnng.” 4) The following hypothesis seems to be considerably plausible : a group of Kant's Reflexionen (3950-3998) which Adickes dated as of 1769, may be the latter half of 1772. If this proposal be accepted, we can trace reasonably the changing process of the pure intellectual concepts (to which the noumenal entities were to correspond in 1770) into the categories (especially categories of relation) whose validity is to be restricted to experience alone (3929-4065)