Critique of Pure Reason - I. Transcendental Doctrine of Elements - Transcendental Logic

Transcendental Logic

In the Transcendental Logic, there is a section (titled The Refutation of Idealism) that frees Kant's doctrine from any vestiges of subjective idealism, which would either doubt or deny the existence of external objects (B274-79). However, Senderowics warns that "... If the Refutation of Idealism indeed addresses a question left unanswered by the previous parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's preceding comments contain a gap that needs to be bridged." Kant's distinction between the appearance and the thing-in-itself is not intended to imply that nothing knowable exists apart from consciousness, as with subjective idealism. Rather, it declares that knowledge is limited to phenomena as objects of a sensible intuition. In the Fourth Paralogism ("... A Paralogism is a logical fallacy."), Kant further certifies his philosophy as distinct from that of subjective idealism by defining his position as a transcendental idealism in accord with empirical realism (A366-80). "The Paralogisms of Pure Reason" is the only chapter of the Dialectic that Kant rewrote for the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first edition, the Fourth Paralogism offers a defence of Transcendental Idealism, which Kant reconsidered and relocated in the second edition.

The Transcendental Logic is that part of the Critique that investigates the understanding and its role in constituting our knowledge. The understanding is defined as the faculty of the mind that deals with concepts (A51-52/B75-76). The Logic is divided into two parts: the Analytic and the Dialectic. In the Analytic, Kant investigates the contributions of the understanding to knowledge. In the Dialectic, Kant investigates the limits of the understanding.

The idea of a transcendental logic is that of a logic that gives an account of the origins of our knowledge as well as its relationship to objects. This is contrasted by Kant with the idea of a general logic, which abstracts from the conditions under which our knowledge is acquired, and from any relation that knowledge has to objects. According to Helge Svare "... It is important to keep in mind what Kant says here about logic in general, and transcendental logic in particular, being the product of abstraction, so that we are not misled when a few pages later he emphasizes the pure, non-empirical character of the transcendental concepts or the categories.

Kant's investigation resulted in his claim that the real world of experience can only be an appearance or phenomenon. What things are in themselves, other than being appearances, or noumenon, are completely unknowable by any animal or human mind.