Kant repeatedly claims his critical enterprise is analogous to pure general logic (PGL) in embodying the self-knowledge of reason. I argue that PGL is self-knowledge in the sense that its claims are epistemically grounded in pure apperception, which yields insight into the form of thinking in general. Kant’s critical epistemology, as distinct from his critical metaphysics, is self-knowledge in an analogous sense: It is an apperceptively grounded inquiry into the form of all a priori thought about objects. I develop an account of the purity, generality, and formality of PGL, which I then leverage into an outline of the apperceptive method that underwrites Kant’s faculty psychology. This novel account of Kant’s critical method distinguishes it from the analytical but dogmatic method of Wolff and the reflective but empirical methods of Locke and Tetens.

I develop an account of Kant’s technical notion of “exposition” and, in particular, “metaphysical” exposition. This involves explaining his distinction between concepts that are “made” and those that are “given,” as well as his murky notion of “original acquisition.” I then turn to Kant’s account of exposition as conceptual analysis. I argue that apperceptive reflection is the principal vehicle of conceptual analysis and, thus, the nervus probandi of Kant’s arguments in the Expositions. This yields a general picture of the Expositions as advancing the critical project of reason’s self-knowledge. An attractive consequence of my account en passant is that the discussion of original acquisition provides a novel and tidy explanation of the much-discussed distinction between formal intuition and the form of intuition in terms of the tripartite Aristotelian distinction between first potentiality, second potentiality (first actuality), and second actuality.

I argue that the sensibility/understanding distinction announced at the end of Kant’s Introduction to the Critique can be justified via pure apperception. I first defend an account of the analytic/synthetic distinction, arguing that analytic judgments articulate intellectual grounds of truth. Synthetic judgments, then, are based on nonintellectual grounds of truth. This provides Kant’s “baseline conception” of receptive intuition as a capacity for representing nonintellectual grounds of truth. This is a “top-down” approach to intuition: a characterization of intuition not in terms of its intrinsic properties but in terms of a prior account of the intellect and its cognitive needs. I then argue that this version of the analytic/synthetic distinction follows from the idea that judgment must track the truth – an idea that is available to us via pure apperception. Thus, Kant’s baseline conception of intuition, as expressed in the sensibility/understanding distinction, can be justified via pure apperception.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of the Transcendental Deduction and addresses the common objection that Heidegger’s interpretation cherry-picks evidence from Kant’s text, failing to address counterevidence adequately. The chapter argues that Heidegger both acknowledges and addresses the counterevidence cited by his critics. Specifically, Heidegger identifies that counterevidence as a component of a traditional strand of argument that is less compelling than other, more radical ideas in Kant’s text. On the traditional strand of argument, Kant attempts to spell out the a priori contact between sensibility and understanding by identifying a form of atemporal self-consciousness, apperception, that uses concepts to actively unify our sense experience. Heidegger is critical of this strand of argument because it remains unclear how apperception, construed as atemporal, can be unified with our temporal sense experience. How do two unlike things come together – time and not-time? Heidegger argues that one arrives at a more convincing account by developing the temporal dimension of apperception, where it holds up expectations for the future. This development helps one appreciate the deeper unity of our passive sensing of the present and our active anticipation of the future – a unity grounded in the temporal structure of the imagination, three interlaced temporal capacities that characterize the human being.

To complement the static analysis of duty in Part I, Part II looks at the law’s leading query,“what is (the) law?” by focusing on its dynamic elements. Instead of simply mapping the law through categories, Holmes sought to develop a positioning system that took into account law’s flux. Part II expounds the central theses of The Common Law and brings to the fore the leading conceptions Holmes used to develop his notion of external standards – apperception and triangulation. It looks at how Holmes traced the development of liability from its primitive origins in revenge. Holmes sought to visualize the law’s movement through such artistic techniques as linear perspective and the creation of vanishing points. Holmes’s efforts to introduce dimensionality into law led him to emphasize the notion of the“purely legal point of view.”

This paper addresses the generality problem arising for the use of spatial figures in geometry by emphasizing Kant’s notion of the schema of a geometrical concept (in contrast to an individual figure falling under that concept). It then relates this notion of schema to space as a form of intuition by connecting geometrical constructions (examples of Kantian schemata) with the possible perspectives of the perceiving subject within space as the form of outer intuition. And it uses this relationship between geometrical schemata and what I thus call "perceptual space" (the form of outer intuition) to develop a new interpretation of the relationship between the understanding and sensibility in section 26 of the Transcendental Deduction. The result is a reading of Kant on space and geometry that shows how geometrical, perceptual, and physical space are necessarily related to one another.