The article proposes an interpretation of Kant’s notions of form of, and formal intuition of space to explain and justify the claim that representing space as object requires a synthesis. This involves identifying the transcendental conditions of the analytic unity of consciousness of this formal intuition and distinguishing between it and its content. On this reading which builds upon recent proposals, footnote B160–1n. involves no revision of the Transcendental Aesthetic: space is essentially characterized by non-conceptual features. The article also addresses worries about the infinite magnitude and the unicity of space, by considering the characteristics and requirements of geometric constructions.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to make incompatible claims regarding the unitary natures of what he takes to be our a priori representations of space and time. I argue that these representations are unitary independently of all synthesis and explain how this avoids problems encountered by other positions regarding the Transcendental Deduction and its relation to the Transcendental Aesthetic in that work. Central is the claim that these representations (1) contain, when characterized as intuitions and considered as prior to any affections of sensibility, only an infinitude of merely possible finite spatial and temporal representations, and (2) are representations that are merely transcendental grounds for the possibilities for receiving or generating finite representations in sensibility that are determined (immediately, in the case of reception) by means of syntheses that accord with the categories.

On one reading of Kant’s account of our original representations of space and time, they are, in part, products of the understanding or imagination. On another, they are brute, sensible givens, entirely independent of the understanding. In this article, while I agree with the latter interpretation, I argue for a version of it that does more justice to the insights of the former than others currently available. I claim that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction turns on the representations of space and time as determinate, enduring particulars, whose unity is both given and a product of synthesis.