Oxford University Press Kant's Transcendental Deduction

In this book, Alison Laywine takes up the mystery of the Transcendental Deduction in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. What is it supposed to accomplish and how? She collects evidence from the Critique and his other writings to determine what Kant took himself to be doing on his own terms and argues that he deliberately adapted elements of his early metaphysics both to set the agenda of the Deduction and to carry it out. She shows that the most important metaphysical element Kant repurposed for the Deduction was his early account of a world: he had argued that a world is not just the sum-total of all substances created by God, but a whole unified by God's universal laws of community that externally relate any given substance to all others. From this conception of a world, Kant then extracted a distinctive way to conceive key elements in the Deduction: experience is thus the whole of all possible appearances unified by the universal laws human understanding gives to nature. This cosmological conception of experience drives the Deduction. Review ...Laywine carefully reconstructs Kant's argumentation with a probing comparison of such related texts as the Inaugural Dissertation and the Duisberg Nachlaß. Sure to become a critical bellwether, Laywine's study revitalizes a classic core text by revealing the extent to which Kant's "cartography of the sensible world" (p. 231 ff) presupposes empirical self-knowledge and orientation in thinking...Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. ― J. G. Moore, Lander University, CHOICE Undoubtedly, Laywine's treatment of the Duisburg Nachlaβin relation to the B-Deduction is a valuable addition to contemporary English-language Kant scholarship. ― Thomas Nemeth, Phenomenological Reviews About the Author Alison Laywine completed her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. She is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. Her research interests extend to ancient philosophy, philosophy of science, and the history of music theory in antiquity and the middle ages.