The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

subject to false critiques, or that there is in fact a valid critique in Schulze‘s work that
occupied his mind until the very end.
Schulze's attack of Kant's theoretical philosophy is that, despite his intentions,
Kant is incapable of providing a convincing account of the possibility of cognition of
empirical objects by merely exhibiting that the origin of the possibility of necessary
synthetic a priori judgments lies a priori in the mind. For Sculze, the above mentioned
problem of the relationship between understanding and sensibility is localized not in a
systematic need for a unifying faculty of representation to be found in consciousness
(Reinhold). Instead, it results in a skepticism concerning the reach of the validity of
cognition of empirical objects that acquires the necessity of its possibility from a mere
―inner source‖ of mental representations and not from outer sensations. Furthermore,
Schulze argues that Kant's very acknowledgment of the fact that only appearances can be
cognized, and not things in themselves, further supports the skeptic‘s perspective that
what Kant claims we can know is no knowledge at all.
Schulze's problem with Kant's proof for the possibility of synthetic a priori
judgments in the KrV is that the latter assumes that their necessity must originate
exclusively a priori in the mind; this is on the basis that it is only under the conditions of
synthetic a priori judgments that objective representations are possible at all. In response
to this problem, Schulze presents counter examples that he believes put into question this
assumption. The first lies in the historicity of human beings and Kant's lack of a proof as
to why the origin of the necessity of these a priori conditions could not be said to arise
out of this historicity. This perspective thus opens up an alternative where the necessity
of synthetic a priori judgments may not only be relative to the impossibility of a subject
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