stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

What is a faculty?
Empirical knowledge or what Kant also calls experience is composed of two elements. “For it
may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through
impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as
the occasion) supplies from itself” (CPR B2). Kant puts the distinction between the two elements
of experience in terms of matter and form. “That experience contains two very dissimilar
elements, namely, the matter of knowledge [obtained] from the senses, and a certain form for the
ordering of this matter, [obtained] from the inner source of the pure intuition and thought which,
on occasion of the sense-impressions, are first brought into action and yield concepts” (CPR
B118/A86). This distinction between the matter and the form is in fact the most basic distinction
of the Critique of Pure Reason. However, it is not on this distinction that Kant focuses this work.
Instead, what primarily interests Kant is just one of these elements of experience. “If our faculty
of knowledge makes any such [formal] addition, it may be that we are not in a position to
distinguish it from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled
in separating it” (CPR B2). In an important sense, the Critique of Pure Reason is that long
practice of attention. And this is how Kant defines the task of the Critique of Pure Reason: “for
the chief question is always simply this:–what and how much can the understanding and reason
know apart from all experience?” (CPR Axvii). In other words, that the Critique of Pure Reason
is the study of the form of experience means that it is a study of the faculty of knowledge or of
the various faculties that compose it. What is a faculty?
Perhaps we get a sense for what a faculty is if we consider the exact role it plays in
experience. I have already quoted the following sentence. “For it may well be that even our
empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own
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