A Critical analysis of Kant’s discursivity principle

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2019

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Okar, Sinan

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This thesis takes issue with the charge leveled against Kant, that the discursivity principle, which states knowledge of objects requires intuitions as well as concepts, remains unargued for in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and therefore is an ungrounded presupposition underlying Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. I argue that Kant in the Introduction to the Critique Kant provides sufficient tools from which an argument for this principle can be reconstructed. Kant’s critique of metaphysics is taken as the first step of this argument which proceeds with an analysis of the conditions of synthetic judgments, a priori and a posteriori. This argument rests on comparing the form of thought, whose properties are investigated by the science of General Logic, with the form of knowledge, which Kant finds is displayed by synthetic judgments. The initial critique of metaphysics in the Introduction is, therefore, at the same time a critique of the science of General Logic, and the results of this critique are normatively binding as it reveals the presuppositions which are required to make synthetic judgments. As the structure of synthetic judgments is shown to include a formal given component, it is also revealed that knowledge requires intuitions as well as concepts.

Subject Keywords

Knowledge, Theory of., Kant, knowledge, discursivity, intuition, synthesis.

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http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12623846/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/44090

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

S. Okar, “A Critical analysis of Kant’s discursivity principle,” Thesis (M.S.) -- Graduate School of Social Sciences. Philosophy., Middle East Technical University, 2019.