Dean's Lecture Series: Transcendental Deduction in Kant

In the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant confesses that the “Transcendental Deduction” of the categories is the section of his work that cost him the most effort to produce. In the centuries since its composition, it has cost his readers just as much-or even more-effort simply to understand. From its style of argumentation to its basic conclusions, this all-important chapter of the Critique remains one of the densest in the entire work. In this lecture, I will present a reading of the Deduction, hoping to make some sense of its fundamental claims and transcendental argument. I’ll focus my exposition around the activity of “apperception”-roughly synonymous with self-consciousness-contending that, for Kant, our cognition of the objective world around us always runs in important ways through our recognition of ourselves in and through that world. Objects align with the concepts that make them what they are just by enabling us to become conscious of ourselves through our experience of them. After exploring the argument of the Deduction, I’ll attempt to make its claims more concrete by showing self-consciousness to consist in taking rational responsibility for one’s claims, beliefs, and actions-in the way Socrates tries to make us do. I will conclude the talk by using the Deduction to think about some of the most notorious questions surrounding Kant’s critical philosophy. How should we understand the so-called “thing-in-itself?” How, and in what sense, are human beings both free and constrained by causality? I think the Deduction has some unexpected answers. The target audience for this lecture is the junior class, who will be discussing Kant in seminar for the first time, but I hope it may also be of some interest to more seasoned readers of the Critique and students who have not yet read it.
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[@DaveWasley]

I'm rereading the first critique and am on the TD. I've been wracking my mind the past few days trying to work out what Kant's saying. This has been the clearest, most helpful video I've seen so far, so thanks. It's spooky though, over the past few years, I've read the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Encyclopaedia Logic (all Hegel). In the Encyclopaedia Logic, this is also summarized quite well...then you realize that the first three chapters of PoS are basically explaining this in a dialectical form, too. Oddly enough, Hegel is easier to read, at least in translation, than Kant, but the Shorter Logic definitely puts a finger on the scale. Anyways, I came to this after watching the Dan Robinson lecture on the TD trying to figure out how Kant deduces the categories from pure self-consciousness as the simple unity of sense representations, and I think I must've read the same 30 some-odd pages of the Transcendental Analytic maybe 10+ times in a row. I accompany all my representations, and am their simple unity, but I wasn't comprehending how that deduction allows me to unify an object from the diversity within the sensory manifold. This was the only thing that made it clear: I *can* always deduce myself (but don't, consciously at least), but that deduction of I am is conceptual, so our originary transcendental proto-concept is the concept of simple unity of self as the being all representation happens to. As concept, it must comply with the logical forms of judgement, and since, in a word, in contains (or is the very) said diversity in sense, said diversity in sense must also comply with logical forms of judgement.

[@PettruchioL]

This fellow has tremendous potential.

[@daviddorsey8754]

Extraordinary Teaching.

[@andrewrae8064]

the whole meta-language of judgments/sentences being more fundamental than concepts/ individual words thing wow

[@nikkixu]

Excellent lecture!

[@elizabethfortson4735]

Brilliant!

[@labrat4986]

Good stuff!

[@seoileiasolar9118]

[@dubbelkastrull]

3:28 bookmark

[@psychonaut689]

The thing-in-itself can't both be compulsory and accidental; Hoffe points out that it functions as a regulatory concept, a bit like a keystone that holds the system together.

[@ChienyuShen]

Where’s the link to the handout? The description link seems to be broken. Thank you! @kitslover2367