In The Architectonic of Reason Lea Ypi argues that Kant ultimately fails in his attempt at grounding the systematic unity of reason because of the lack of the practical domain of freedom in the first Critique. I aim to advance a more nuanced reading of Kant’s alleged failure by (1) distinguishing between the schematism of the ideas in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and the schematism of pure reason in the Architectonic. (2) I suggest that, while the practical domain of freedom is not established in the first Critique, the Canon and the Architectonic do account for its condition: the practical employment of reason and its unity with the theoretical. I point out that while (3) the schematism of the ideas accounts for the sole systematic arrangement of the understanding’s cognitions and the regulative role of the ideas and the ideal, in the Architectonic, (4) the schematism of pure reason instead bears more generally on systematicity as reason’s way of proceeding in framing its own unitary whole and the unity between its two lawful employments.

Within Kant scholarship, there is an entrenched tendency to distinguish, on Kant’s behalf, between pure and ‘schematized’ categories. There is also a widespread tendency to view the schematized categories as conceptually richer than the pure categories. I argue that this reading of the distinction, which I call the standard view, should be rejected. In its place, I draw on a neglected part of Kant’s theory of marks – namely, his account of ‘synthetic attributes’ – to propose an account of the distinction that preserves a strict identity between pure and schematized categories at the level of analysable content.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes schematism as a ‘hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ (A141/B180–1). While most commentators treat this as Kant's metaphorical way of saying schematism is something too obscure to explain, I argue that we should follow up Kant's clue and treat schematism literally as Kunst. By letting our interpretation of schematism be guided by Kant's theoretically exact ways of using the term Kunst in the Critique of Judgment we gain valuable insight into the nature of schematism, as well as its connection to Kant's concerns in the third Critique.

In this paper the attempt is made to show how Schopenhauer's critique of Kant leads from initial disagreements to a fundamental modification, even a new formation, of the Kantian concepts of understanding, reason, imagination, perception, idea and thing-in-itself. The starting point and the core of his critique is the demand for the appreciation of intuitive knowledge which is apart from and independent of reason. The intuitive knowledge goes back to images and its highest form is aesthetic contemplation. Without a participation of concepts it is sufficient to explain objective reality. Particularly on the basis of Schopenhauer's critical examination of Kant's schematism it can be shown that his alternative conception of an image-based objectivity of experience is to be taken seriously, even if the way he presents it sometimes gives the impression of a mere misunderstanding of Kant's theory of cognition.