BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY IN THE CRITIQUE
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explore the origin of knowledge, but its objectivity or validity. According
to the definition given in chapter one above, its project is epistemic.
Another explicitly stated purpose of the Critique, which also concerns the
validity of knowledge, is to offer a basic critique of traditional
metaphysics.
Kant uses the term ‘transcendental philosophy’ to characterize the
general project of the Critique. The term refers, among other things, to
the project of answering how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. In
answering this question he develops a number of so-called transcendental
arguments, most famous of which are the transcendental deductions of
the categories. An integral part of Kant’s transcendental philosophy is
also his transcendental idealism, involving the idea that all our
experience is representational, that space and time are nothing but forms
of our experience, and that we have to distinguish between the objects of
the world as we experience them, and those objects as they are in
themselves, which lie beyond the reach of human knowledge.
Even if Kant underlines the epistemic perspective of the Critique, the
work also contains an elaborate cognitive theory explaining the origin or
genesis of experience. Very briefly, this is the theory of a self endowed
with a mind [Gemüt]. This self is typically referred to by means of the
term ‘subject’ or by first person pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘we’ and equivalent
terms. Further it is a theory of how this subject is affected by objects
outside it, and also how, along with such effects, it performs various
cognitive acts, resulting in what Kant calls experience [Erfahrung] or
knowledge [Erkenntnis]. In the Critique these are typically used as
equivalent terms (cf. e.g. B1), and in the following I shall normally use the
term ‘experience’ to cover both.
4.2 Phases, perspectives and continuities
The interpretative approach to be followed in the following chapters is
based on the assumption that there is a continuity between the Critique
and some of the texts examined in the previous chapters. More
specifically, I argue that some of the reflections in the Critique
presuppose or imply ideas developed and held in these other texts, ideas
that may be associated with Kant’s anthropology understood in a wide
sense.
A possible objection to such a claim is that it is inconsistent with the
often expressed idea that Kant’s intellectual development may be divided
into distinct phases, and that the Critique belongs to a phase essentially
different from the others. Perhaps a more sophisticated version of this
argument is that the Critique represents a critical and/or transcendental