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

further. “Sensible intuition is either pure intuition (space and time) or empirical intuition of that
which is immediately represented, through sensation, as actual in space and time” (CPR B147).
Thus the transcendental deduction does not argue that subjective conditions of thought have
objective validity because they apply to objects in pure intuition; rather, it argues that subjective
conditions of thought have objective validity because they apply to objects in empirical intuition,
that is, in experience. Kant argues that the categories satisfy this condition. “Even, therefore,
with the aid of [pure] intuition, the categories do not afford us any knowledge of things; they do
so only through their possible application to empirical intuition. In other words, they serve only
for the possibility of empirical knowledge; and such knowledge is what we entitle experience”
(CPR B148). The categories apply to objects in empirical intuition. “Our conclusion is therefore
this: the categories, as yielding knowledge of things, have no kind of application, save only in
regard to things which may be objects of possible experience” (CPR B148).
The problem with the transcendental ideas is that they do not apply to objects in intuition
at all, let alone to objects in empirical intuition. “Accordingly, even if pure reason does concern
itself with objects, it has no immediate relation to these and the intuition of them, but only to the
understanding and its judgments—which deal at first hand with the senses and their intuition for
the purpose of determining their object. The unity of reason is therefore not the unity of possible
experience, but is essentially different from such unity, which is that of understanding” (CPR
A307/B364). If subjective conditions of thought have objective validity because they apply to
objects in empirical intuition, then since transcendental ideas do not apply to objects in intuition
at all they have no objective validity. If “the explanation of the manner in which concepts can
thus relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction” (CPR A85/B118), this also
means that there can be no transcendental deduction of transcendental ideas. “No objective
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