Understanding Kant's Transcendental Philosophy

Transcendental Dialectic

Part of the "Critique of Pure Reason" that studies the functioning and structure of understanding. It is called "dialectic" because dialectical arguments are generated by using pure reason in its quest to capture the unconditioned, as Kant describes.

Kant believes that reason always seeks the condition or ground of things. Indeed, scientific research appears as a result of this desire for understanding the causes, conditions, or reasons behind phenomena. However, if the spontaneous workings of reason are not limited by critique, they tend to think about the ultimate condition of three major areas: the status or ultimate foundation of our mental life, the status or ultimate foundation of the physical world, and the condition or ground of all phenomena, both physical and mental. When reason acts unchecked, it leads to traditional objects of metaphysics, such as the soul, the world as a whole, and God. Kant believed that the use of reason, which he calls dialectic, is inadequate and leads to fallacies and contradictions.

Transcendental Aesthetic

Part of the "Critique of Pure Reason" that studies sensitivity to understand how this power works in a priori knowledge.

Intuition is the immediate knowledge of objects. In the "Transcendental Aesthetic," Kant shows that we must distinguish two aspects in all intuition:

• Sensations, which are the empirical element, due to the influence of objects on the power of knowledge that he calls sensitivity;

• A priori forms, which are not the result of the influence of these objects, but the way the structure of sensitivity orders (Kant synthesizes) sensations. These forms are time and space.

Kant called the phenomenon the synthesis or assembly of such forms with the sensations.

The fundamental conclusion of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" is that time and space are not independent realities of the knower but a priori forms of sensibility, forms that the psyche imposes on all that can be known. For an object to be perceived, it must be subject to the formal conditions imposed by sensitivity: time and space. This fact makes it possible to have precise synthetic a priori knowledge. In the "Introduction," Kant shows, for example, that it is possible to have synthetic a priori knowledge in mathematics because the laws discovered by science are nothing but pure laws relating to time (in the case of arithmetic) and space (in the case of geometry), i.e., laws that are the basic structure imposed by the human psyche on all possible experience.

Transcendental Analytic

Part of the "Critique of Pure Reason" in which Kant examines understanding to see how this cognitive faculty is involved in synthetic a priori knowledge. It deals with the elements of pure knowledge and understanding of the principles without which no object can be thought.

It is called "analytical" because it breaks down or analyzes all our knowledge a priori to reach non-empirical elements or pure understanding. The two major sections or chapters of the "Transcendental Analytic" are the transcendental deduction of the categories and the metaphysical deduction of the categories. The key findings of the "Transcendental Analytic" are:

• Understanding elements found in non-empirical, a priori elements that Kant calls the categories;

• This power imposes intellectual conditions in order to think about objects that are offered to sensitivity;

• Although they have no empirical origin, the categories and the pure principles of understanding can only be used empirically: they can be used to conceptualize or understand the material given to sensitivity (as when I say "I'm writing on a table" or "my arm is the cause of the displacement of the chair in the living room, ...") but not to conceptualize or understand what is beyond empirical experience or perception (as when I say "God is One" or "God is the cause of the existence of things").