@phdthesis{01J0KTXEA9XV71NQKV02YZVRNM,
  abstract     = {{The present dissertation offers an interpretation of the so-called “metaphysical deduction” of the categories (=MD), the chapter of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft in which Kant seeks to establish “the origin of the a priori categories [...] through their complete coincidence” with the “logical functions of thinking” (B159). Generally speaking, then, the dissertation is concerned with the relation between two of Kant’s ‘tables’: the table of judgments or logical functions, on the one hand, and the table of categories, on the other. 
I argue we cannot properly appreciate Kant’s argument in the MD without sharply distinguishing between categories (qua concepts of transcendental logic) and empirical concepts (qua concepts of formal logic). While empirical concepts arise on the basis of the logical application of the functions on sensible objects, so as to bring them under the analytic unity of consciousness, categories arise when those same functions are applied not to sensible objects, but to sensibility per se, namely so as to synthetically transform our raw and blind sensible intuitions into representations of objects — objects that can be subsumed under empirical concepts. Thus, I maintain that we must view Kant’s derivation of the categories as a critique of predication, i.e., as an outline of the conditions of possibility of relating (empirical) concepts to objects and vice versa. 
Methodologically, I claim that we should pay attention to Kant’s philosophy of biology if we are seriously committed to grasping why the spontaneous understanding must be assumed to play a role even at the heart of the receptivity of our senses. I substantiate this methodological choice, in Part 0, through a survey of Kant’s disagreements with Johann Gottfried von Herder on epigenesis, the categories, and their entwinement. 
This paves the way for my reconstruction of the MD in Part 1, where I defend the following overarching claim: Kant’s argument in the MD is operating under the architectonic idea that the functions of thought serve as the understanding’s preformed germs and predispositions, capable of epigenetically giving rise to either formal-logical or analytical activities of thought, or to transcendental-logical or synthetical activities. 
Part 2 then applies this methodological framework to a case-study: the derivation of the categories of quantity (unity, plurality, and totality) from the quantitative functions of thinking (the universal, particular, and singular judgments). Here, I make more concrete what it means for categories to be normative constraints on the synthesis of intuitions. Without the quantitative categories of unity, plurality, and totality, we would not be able to identify spatiotemporal individuals, and hence we would not be able to form empirical concepts and predicate them of objects. Finally, through a reading of the Kritik der Urteilskraft’s “Analytic of the Sublime”, I explore what it would be like (epistemically) to try and bring representations under the analytic unity of empirical concepts without having brought them to the synthetic unity of the categories first.}},
  author       = {{Haeck, Levi}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{XIX, 326}},
  publisher    = {{Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Kant’s epigenetic segue into the synthetic a priori : deriving the categories as a  critique of predication}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}