Hedging Around Objectivity

Responses to Karin de Boer, Henny Blomme & Hein van den Berg

Below text is a translated and slightly revised version of a part of a response piece, in Dutch, to critiques by Karin de Boer, Henny Blomme, Hein van den Berg and Joris Spigt of my Kant’s Radical Subjectivism: Perspectives on the Transcendental Deduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). The Dutch version was published in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 80 (2) (2018): 363–378. Having made the English text available before on Philpapers and having published it on the now defunct Critique website, I repost it here for easy access. The discussion of the thing in itself (addressed by Blomme) and Hegel’s critique of Kant (addressed by Joris Spigt) have been left out here to focus on the topic of objectivity.

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In this paper, I respond to critiques by Karin de Boer, Henny Blomme, Hein van den Berg and Joris Spigt of my book Kant’s Radical Subjectivism: Perspectives on the Transcendental Deduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). I address issues that are raised concerning objectivity, the nature of the object, the role of transcendental apperception and the imagination. I also very briefly respond to a question that relates to the debate on Kantian nonconceptualism, more in particular, the question whether Kant allows animals objective intentionality.

Hein van den Berg raises a very interesting question—namely, about the sense in which I suggested that Kant is probably a coherentist (2017:2–3)—which because of lack of space I cannot answer here. In any case, I agree with Van den Berg that Kant cannot be considered a coherentist in a contemporary sense and that Kant is more of a traditional foundationalist. Whether Kant sees truth as correspondence or coherence is a complicated matter, which also relates to the question concerning what Kant calls ‘transcendental truth’ (see 2017, chs 3 and 4); transcendental truth does in some sense concern a correspondence between concept and object or thing (adæquatio intellectus et rei), but one that is fully internalised in the transcendental subject—the metaphysical question of truth and the epistemology of the cognising subject have here merged into one. This is compatible with the view, as Van den Berg suggests, that Kant’s idealism implies that he espouses a correspondence theory of truth, at any rate insofar as the truth of empirical knowledge claims about appearances is concerned. As Van den Berg himself already notes, it is not easy to decide how exactly to interpret Kant’s theory of truth. I want to return to this issue when another opportunity arises.

1. Transcendental Apperception and Objectivity

I confine myself here to the substantial criticisms. First I address the question concerning transcendental apperception that is broached by Karin de Boer (hereafter cited as De Boer 2018). The central thesis of Kant’s Radical Subjectivism—and this goes against more traditional realist intuitions, which seem ineradicable even among Kantians—is to claim that objects as such do not exist outside the transcendental subject and thus outside transcendental apperception. As De Boer acknowledges, I claim that transcendental apperception is the necessary and formally sufficient condition of objective knowledge (note the adverb ‘formally’!, which De Boer handily fails to do). De Boer considers this claim untenable because it would make Kant into a rationalist. For, as she writes, ‘transcendental apperception [is] a purely intellectual activity’ (De Boer 2018:357)—I disagree with this, by the way, because this would mean that transcendental apperception only concerns the analytical unity of concepts, and not also precisely the synthetic unity of representations in the non-intellectual, sensible intuition, regardless of the question whether this intuition is ‘similar to our own or not’ (B148).

There are two additional subjective sources of knowledge: sensibility and the imagination, and the imagination cannot be reduced to the understanding, as De Boer notes.¹ Obviously, I do not deny that sensibility and the imagination are necessary; what’s more, I dedicate two whole chapters to the imagination and its absolutely central role in the argument of both the A and B Deductions (chs 6 and 7). De Boer suggests she did not consider those two chapters, while the titles of those chapters clearly refer to the threefold synthesis (in the A Deduction) and the figurative synthesis (in the B Deduction), and thus are important for the critique she directs against my reading, especially with respect to the imagination. As said, De Boer also neglects to take note (twice in her text) of important words such as ‘at least formally’. I emphasise again and again that what is at stake is the possibility of objective, empirical knowledge as depending on transcendental apperception, namely insofar as such knowledge can be established a priori as objective. A posteriori sensible impressions must thereby be presupposed as necessarily given. Neither the fact that there are sensible impressions, nor their a posteriori nature, nor the fact that there is objective knowledge, nor the material (contingent) nature of cognitive judgements can be demonstrated in a transcendental proof (see e.g. chs 3, 4 and 7). Hence I wrote that apperception is only formally sufficient for objective, empirical knowledge, insofar namely as it concerns the form and not the matter of such knowledge.²

However, one could still object, as De Boer appears to do, that my thesis cannot be right and that transcendental apperception is at the most a necessary and not even a formally sufficient condition of objective knowledge, for transcendental apperception concerns only the principle of self-ascription of representations and does not ground our objective representations, let alone the objects of those representations. De Boer in fact poses the same question as some other commentators from the recent past³: why would the necessary and sufficient condition of self-consciousness (transcendental apperception) also be the necessary—let alone sufficient—condition of both the experience of objects and the objects of experience (A111, A158/B197)?

The reader of De Boer’s piece could be forgiven for thinking that I failed to take this question into account and that her critique is justified, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is a central problematic in both my first book and the book critiqued here, and it was again discussed in an exchange between Anil Gomes and myself in Kantian Review (see here and here). If one denies that transcendental apperception is also a (formally) sufficient condition of objective knowledge (the claim namely that Kant makes in B138, the passage I discuss in detail),⁴ a so-called GAP results in Kant’s argument in the Deduction (sometimes this analytic jargon comes in really handy!). The GAP is twofold, namely, there is a gap between both (1) transcendental apperception and the objective unity of consciousness and (2) the objective unity of consciousness, which defines an object in general, and ‘real’ objects.

My solution to the GAP is, put succinctly, to say that (1) transcendental apperception is not a psychological principle of representation or consciousness, (2) the transcendental unity of apperception is an objective unity, as Kant says himself (B139), and (3) transcendental apperception in the guise of the imagination in sensibility (i.e. as synthesis of the apprehension, cf. §26) is responsible for the necessary combination of spatiotemporal representations, such that we can speak of objective knowledge (or experience, with which Kant identifies knowledge [B148]), assuming of course that there are objects and those objects sensibly affect us (the factualness of experience and of a world of objects is never put to doubt by Kant). Again, it is purely the formal aspect of our objective knowledge which is at issue here, objective knowledge qua objective, not its material aspect.⁵ De Boer overlooks this crucial aspect.

That which leads to the GAP is the mistaken assumption that Kant talks about the material aspects of our objective knowledge (knowledge facts) and, crucially, that transcendental apperception is merely the principle of the self-ascription of all possible representations (whether or not interpreted psychologically). The traditional reading of transcendental apperception is modally ‘excessive’, which I explain ad nauseam in both my books. If De Boer were right in her critique, it would directly lead to a multiple GAP (the same holds mutatis mutandis for the critique that Henny Blomme presents; see below). For she is not able to explain the a priori, internal relation between the various formally distinguishable necessary elements of sensibility, synthesis of apprehension, imagination and apperception: what connects them, and how can Kant demonstrate that it is the imagination that is the sufficient condition of objective knowledge?⁶ Is it again another faculty which on a more fundamental level connects everything, a kind of ‘schminagination’, as Robert Hanna has put this very aptly?⁷

De Boer’s way of presenting it leads to the philosophical problem of an infinite regress in the explanatory grounds. And the original synthetic unity of apperception was precisely designed by Kant to avoid such regresses in the analysis of possible objective experience. My thesis of Kant’s radical subjectivism bypasses this potential explanatory infinite regress and shows how all formally distinguishable explanatory elements necessarily hang together internally (including the categories). Kant must not be read as if he were still thinking along the lines of the definition and classification urge of his predecessors. Rather, he should be read more in the fashion of a dynamical interpretation such as Hegel’s.⁸

As I explicate in detail in the book, there is nothing outside the transcendental apperception of our representations insofar as it concerns objectively valid experience. That is to say, nothing outside our representations simpliciter can function as a justifying ground of our knowledge claims. On what does objective knowledge rest? Not on sensible facts, not on objects out there, but rather upon our capacity to apprehend, in virtue of an original synthesis, our representations as of a sensible, spatiotemporally intuited object. Transcendental apperception is that original synthesis, and apperception is not merely ‘intellectual’, as De Boer thinks. The ‘intellectual synthesis’ of which Kant speaks at B151 is a formal abstraction in the analysis, which shows that intellectual synthesis is the necessary condition of objectively valid knowledge, whereas figurative synthesis is the sufficient condition; but both syntheses are aspects of one and the same principle of transcendental apperception, manifestations of the understanding, as Kant clearly says in §24 of the B Deduction (see also B153, where Kant speaks of the understanding ‘under the designation of a transcendental synthesis of the imagination’). Transcendental apperception thus establishes the bridge between the purely rational (the combining of concepts) and the sensible, of course by means of the imagination; but the imagination is not another, distinct capacity or faculty other than transcendental apperception itself as the act of the understanding in its manifestation in the manifold of an empirical intuition. The distinctions are formally required for the analysis, but in an actual empirical judgement which yields knowledge transcendental apperception always is the imagination which as synthesis of the apprehension does its synthesising work (see §§24 and 26 of the B Deduction).

The only absolute distinction that Kant makes is the one between, on the one hand, the capacity for synthesis, which also grounds our conceptuality as such, and sensibility, on the other. We can never get immediate access, merely in virtue of our conceptuality, to actually existing things. In that sense, sensibility plays a necessary role and provides the materially sufficient ground of our objective knowledge. But objectivity or objective validity, objective knowledge qua objective, is purely a function of our transcendental apperception, naturally in the guise of the imagination to the extent that it concerns spatiotemporal objects. That is my thesis of Kant’s radical subjectivism, which is not a psychological subjectivism, nor an intellectual rationalism, but a transcendental theory of knowledge that shows what it means to be able to say, in general, that we have knowledge of objects and under which conditions it is possible to say so. De Boer rightly points to the role of the categories. While I do talk about that role in the book (in Chapter 2, which De Boer says she did not consider), the real story can be found in the 340 plus pages of my previous book [Kant’s Deduction From Apperception, rev. ed., De Gruyter 2018], in which I discuss in detail the derivation of the categories from apperception and how in this way a relation to an object is established.⁹

Lastly and crucially, De Boer makes an interpretative mistake in thinking that ‘the concept “real object”’ (De Boer 2018:356) plays a positive role in my interpretation. She is apparently confused about this putative position of mine because it would ‘undermine [...] the “idealist” element’ of my interpretation (De Boer 2018:360). However, it is not my position. In the passage that De Boer cites, I am clearly talking about a false view shared by many Kantians with a realist orientation, who think more along the lines of the traditional theory of knowledge, that is, the view that says that the categories concern merely our way of experiencing or knowing the object and not the object itself (the ‘real object’) independently of our way of thinking or experiencing. The question that De Boer subsequently poses—‘So is there a “gap” between our pure concepts and the real objects to which they refer after all?’ (De Boer 2018:360)—can confidently be negated. As De Boer says towards the end of §2, but means as a critique of my position: ‘In my view, the term “real object” does not play a role in this context’ (De Boer 2018:361). And nor in my view, and I nowhere suggest it does. I make it quite clear—for this is precisely the core of my thesis of Kant’s radical subjectivism—that outside the categories, outside transcendental apperception, no real objects exist (things in themselves do of course so exist).¹⁰

2. Are There ‘Weaker’ and ‘Stronger’ Notions of Objective Validity?

As with De Boer, Henny Blomme’s view (hereafter cited as Blomme 2018) also runs the risk of an explanatory infinite regress when he talks about ‘non-analytic transitions’ (Blomme 2018:370) in the deduction argument. Those transitions are indeed non-analytic in terms of the semantic content of the argument, but at the level of the analysis, i.e. the deduction argument itself, those transitions are very much analytic. There is an ‘analytical connexion’, in the words of P.F. Strawson, in Kant’s transcendental argument, otherwise there is no transcendental-logical sequence of necessarily cohering premisses—the deduction is an a priori argument after all —and a valid conclusion following from those premises. It is the analytic principle of transcendental apperception—from which the steps of the a priori argument proceed—which ‘explains’, as Kant says (B135), the non-analytic (i.e. synthetic a priori) semantic content of the analysis.

Blomme subsequently refers to ‘weaker’ and ‘stronger’ notions of objective validity, of which I would be making use. But in my perspective there is no such thing as a weaker and stronger form of objective validity. Neither do I see any textual ground in the Deduction that would support such a distinction. Of course, there is—as I make it clear in the book—a clear formal distinction between the concept of an object in general and an actual, concrete judgement about an empirical object. (Naturally, as Blomme says, it can also be an imaginary constructed mathematical object.) However, one must then not transpose this distinction, which plays a formal role in the analysis of particularly the B Deduction, to reality as if some arbitrary epistemic agent literally first could have an objectively valid concept of an object in general, subsequently employs it in a judgement and then drags in an empirical intuition so as to finally have an objectively valid cognition in its so-called ‘strong’ form. As Kant says, concepts are employed only in judgements, not outside of them (A68/B93), and this holds certainly also for the categories, which are nothing but functions of judgement insofar as the underlying intuition is determined (B143),¹¹ and equally for such an offshoot a priori concept as the concept of ‘an object in general’. The concept of ‘an object in general’ is after all nothing but the objective unity of consciousness or apperception and the objective unity of apperception is nothing but the definition of judgement in its most essential, i.e. objectively valid character.¹² To say that one can have an objectively valid concept of an object in general independently of how such a concept functions in a de facto empirical judgement (whether it concerns concrete, empirical or abstract, mathematical objects) is transcendental-logically nonsensical. One should not try to situate a concept that has a function in an analysis in an ontological context as if it concerned an isolatable moment in concrete experience.

As I explain repeatedly in the book, objective validity is a function of judgement and of judgement only. Judgements need of course not be about literally perceivable objects (one can think of magnetic fields, which are not perceivable with our senses), but objectively valid judgements in the strict sense should always be coupled to possible experience. Blomme appears to make a distinction between, on the one hand, objective validity and, on the other, the objectivity of cognitive judgements or what he calls ‘objective cognitive judgements’ (in Dutch: objectieve kennisoordelen [Blomme 2018:370]). But it is not clear to me what he means by the latter. If he means ‘true judgements’,¹³ then I concur, for as I explicate in detail in Chapters 3 and 4, objectively valid judgements need not be true judgements and true judgements need not be objectively valid judgements; put otherwise, objective validity has nothing to do with the truth value of a judgement. I can make a false judgement which is still objectively valid (e.g. a judgement about a certain object that I perceive but to which I attribute the wrong properties), or I can make a judgement which is not at all objectively valid regardless of the question whether it is true or false (e.g. analytic judgements, which are not about objects).

Blomme uncouples the objective validity of the categories from judgement, which in my view is not justified because categories are in fact functions of judgement in a particalur respect. I suspect he conflates objectively valid and true (factually objective) judgements, but if that is true, it is clearly mistaken, for as said not all objectively valid judgements are true or factually objective and not all true judgements are objectively valid—i.e. analytic judgements, which are actually not real judgements in the sense of Kant’s definition in the Deduction in §19, but rather statements or propositions that have a surface grammar similar to proper judgements. Uncoupling objective validity from judgement only leads to such confusion.¹⁴ Blomme’s analysis takes place on too abstract a level and he confuses the ‘event’, as it were, of judgement with the formal analysis of its various constituent elements.

The difference between types of object does not translate to a difference with respect the nature of objective validity, as if there were indeed weaker and stronger forms of objective validity, as Blomme suggests. Objective validity is purely and only a function of the unity of apperception, by which judgement is fundamentally characterised, and thus of the categories. An objectively valid judgement is a judgement in which the categories are instantiated, independently of the question of whether the judgement is true or false. Empirical intuition is a necessary condition of concrete empirical judgements, but it does not furnish anything in terms of a justifying ground which is not already provided completely by the unity of apperception, which happens in the form of a figurative synthesis in the manifold of an empirical intuition (cf. B151–2). Kant’s theory of knowledge is not an epistemic externalism, but a thoroughgoing internalism as far as justification is concerned. Therefore, I do not see a reason to make a distinction between ‘weaker’ and ‘stronger’ forms of objective validity.

What empirical intuition does uniquely provide (and this is probably what Blomme means), is real possibility. It is real possibility which makes the difference between judgements about transcendent objects that we cannot experience and objectively valid judgements about objects of our possible experience—which is the real topic of the Deduction. What Kant thus demonstrates in the so-called ‘second step’ of the B Deduction is to show that the concept of an object in general that is conceived in the ‘first step’ corresponds to a spatiotemporal really possible object in empirical intuition. In a certain sense—and this is of course the actual goal of the Deduction—it is only in the second step that the objective validity of the categories in a judgement about an empirical object is first demonstrated. But this does not detract from the fact that objective validity lies in the nature of judgement as such, because it is—and this is the core of my account about Kant’s radical subjectivism—the transcendental, judging, apperceiving subject which determines the objective validity and nothing else. (I fully concur in this with Robert Pippin’s position.) In other words, it is not as if with the empirical intuition a little more objective validity were added to the concept of an object as it is employed in judgement.

In any case, Blomme is mistaken to believe that I use ‘two notions of “objective validity’ of the categories’ (Blomme 2018:370) and I do also not go along with his proposal to distinguish between the objective validity and ‘the objective realisation’ of the categories (Blomme 2018:370–2). I see neither the textual support nor the interpretative requirement for such a move,¹⁵ let alone for what he calls the ‘subjective validity’ and ‘objective validity of judgements’. Blomme probably means by ‘subjective validity’ of judgements the judgements of perception from the Prolegomena which are only subjectively valid. But Blomme could have known from reading the book that I concur with Konstantin Pollok’s thesis that Kant abandoned the theory of judgements of perception before the B Deduction.

As far as his complaint is concerned that I do not sufficiently differentiate between perception, judgement of perception, experience etc., I believe that Blomme tries to impose his own ‘layer cake’ model on my reading, a model that following James Conant¹⁶ I reject. Blomme thereby completely ignores my account of the modality of Kant’s argument regarding perception in e.g. §26 of the B Deduction (see Chapters 5 and 7). What he subsequently says about my reference to ‘limitation’ in Chapter 9 is unwarranted. Blomme disregards the metaphysical context of the discussion in that chapter. For an exhaustive delineation of the function of the categories of quantity and quality in the deduction itself, I should like to refer him to Chapters 8 and 9 of my previous book.

3. Nonconceptual Content and Animal Object-Directedness

Van den Berg (hereafter cited as Van den Berg 2018) wonders what I, as a moderate conceptualist, think about the possibility that animals have objective perceptions of objects. Sacha Golob posed the same question in a recent discussion of my book. Van den Berg cites Colin McLear’s well-known paper on Kant and animal consciousness.¹⁷ He refers to McLear by saying that ‘the conceptualist can take two positions with respect to non-human animals’. On the one hand, the conceptualist ‘can argue that non-human animals are conscious only of their sensations, which as a result of a lack of conceptual capacities are experienced as a blooming, buzzing confusion’, in the words of William James. ‘Or the conceptualist can argue that non-human animals do not have objective perceptual representations nor have sensory consciousness of objects’ (Van den Berg 2018:384).

In my view, these are not the exhaustive possibilities. For the moderate conceptualist reserves space for the possibility that animals have representations of objects in virtue of the fact that those objects affect their sensible capacities, and have in some sense consciousness of these because each representation as such must have an intensive magnitude which is >0, which corresponds to the intensity of consciousness. Golob formulated his critique of the Kantian conceptualist in such in a way that, because the conceptualist reserves objectivity or object-directedness or intentionality for category-regulated object-directedness—namely, intentionality which is a function of the categories of the understanding—he (the conceptualist) must deny that animals are object-directed.

This makes it difficult, according to Golob, for the conceptualist to explain how it is possible that animals are in fact rather well-directed towards the objects with which they interact. Golob mentions the excellent example of an eagle that, in its swoop and equipped with a highly developed eyesight, is precisely directed at its prey and is able accurately to differentiate it from the rock adjacent to it. According to Golob, this requires a highly accurate capacity for discriminating complex natural relations. But, the reasoning goes, the conceptualist reserves that capacity for discriminating complex natural relations for rational beings who comprehend those complex relations as such in virtue of the application of categories in judgements. Golob also thinks that my view on objective validity as merely a function of judgement runs the risk of reducing this capacity to rational beings, and that on my account animals must be denied the capacity for discriminating complex things. In such a perspective, for animals everything would be a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’.

I do indeed deny that, as Golob sees it, animals are object-directed, which is however characterised by Golob as different from the category-governed directness by which human capacities is characterised. I deny this because object-directedness presupposes an explicit subjectivity, that is, a subjective perspective from which the subject herself relates, reflexively, to an object. If this reflexivity is lacking, such as with animals, then strictly speaking one cannot speak of object-directedness. Nonetheless doing so would in fact be an anthropomorphic projection. Perhaps it sounds plausible to speak of an animal’s perspective, but that is again from the perspective of how we make it intelligible to ourselves how an animal relates to its environment. The animal, by contrast, relates to its environment in an immediate fashion and exactly not in a reflexive relation in which it itself is conscious of its environment as distinct from itself. This absence of reflexivity, or subjectivity, does not prevent an animal from having creature consciousness, nor does it deny the fact that their objective environment sensibly affects them and that as spatiotemporal objects in nature and fully in line with the laws of nature they can perform complex actions and can react to complex structures and other objects. Of course much more could be said about this complex problematic, but unfortunately there is no space to do that here.¹⁸

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© Dennis Schulting, 2018, 2022.

1. Heidegger too thinks that the capacity of the imagination must not be reduced to being a function of the understanding. Heidegger’s reading rests, as is well-known, on the A Deduction. However, as I show in Chapter 6, the A Deduction need not be read in the way that Heidegger does. Hegel says mutatis mutandis the same, whose critique I address in detail in Chapter 8 of the book. Though I disagree with Hegel’s criticism, his interpretation of Kant, that is, that the imagination is merely a function of the understanding, is correct. De Boer’s critique of my view rests on her own presupposition that Kant himself makes a sharp, not merely formal distinction between the power of the imagination and the understanding, a reading that Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s identification of the two alone makes implausible. I suspect that on this point De Boer is led by her reading of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation.

2. See especially Schulting (2017:77–8). My analysis there of the term Erkenntnis and how it relates to our contemporary concept of knowledge directly contradicts De Boers critique that I conflate ‘objective cognition’ and ‘empirical knowledge’, as she contends.

3. For references see Schulting, Kant’s Deduction From Apperception. An Essay on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), ch. 4

4. I follow Henry Allison’s so-called ‘Reciprocity thesis’ for the Deduction. See Schulting (2018).

5. See also the discussion in Schulting (2017), ch. 7.

6. See again the discussion between me and Anil Gomes, op. cit.

7. Robert Hanna, ‘The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/kant-judgment/supplement1.html.

8. See e.g. Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, which I discuss extensively in Schulting (2017), ch. 8. One could say that Hegel in that sense, because of the semblance of an urge to classify faculties, rightly accuses Kant of psychologism or at least the appearance of psychologism, which he inherits not only from Locke but also from Wolff and Baumgarten. See Schulting (2017:348).

9. In his commentary, Blomme says that I ‘make it appear as if [my views] are shared by only a marginal minority, such as the thesis that the categories express the unity of the original apperception and thus can, according to Kant, in one way or the other be derived from it’ (Blomme 2018:365). Well, that last thing is precisely a standpoint that is shared by exactly none of my English speaking interlocutors! I’m pleased with Blomme’s support in this, but I am afraid that this will remain one of those issues which will separate the classical systematic-historical Kant scholarship from the broadly analytical approach. Notice, by the way, that the thesis that all twelve categories are in fact derived in the Transcendental Deduction is also not delineated by important German scholars such as Manfred Baum, Klaus Reich and Michael Wolff, though they are sympathetic to it (this holds certainly for Klaus Reich, whose derivation of the logical functions of judgement was the model for my own interpretation of the derivation of the categories).

10. De Boer further says that ‘I am rather vague about the question about where exactly our empirical judgements get their objectivity’ (De Boer 2018:360). I find this surprising, since, in Chapters 3 and 4, I extensively discuss the connection between objective validity (objectivity) and judgement. The fact that my reading did not convince her could be due to the fact she has not really captured the radicality of my interpretation of the role of judgement, and what this says about objective validity, truth and correspondence.

11. That last qualification ‘insofar as the underlying intuition is determined’ does not imply, as Blomme suggests, that the categories and the functions of judgement are not identical.

12. I cannot concur with Blomme’s view that the concept of an object in general in its ‘minimal sense’ is the ‘unity of a conscious representation’ (Blomme 2018:367–8, 370). That would imply that any arbitrary representation or series of representations that occur is by definition an objective unity of apperception. This is philosophically as well as interpretatively not a defensible position (see Schulting 2017, ch. 4; cf. 2018, ch. 4)

13. That this is what Blomme appears to mean is suggested by his phrase ‘intersubjectively certain factualness (the being-there)’ (Blomme 2018:368), which he associates with the objectivity of judgements.

14. This confusion is increased by the fact that Blomme later on speaks of objectively valid ‘judgements about Gegenstände überhaupt [...], in which the categories thus necessarily find a certain realisation’, but which are ‘not automatically objective cognitive judgements’ (Blomme 2018:370). Blomme reads my interpretation with glasses on through which I cannot read.

15. Sometimes a distinction is made between ‘objective validity’ and ‘objective reality’, but Kant often conflates the two terms.

16. James Conant, ‘Why Kant is Not a Kantian’, Philosophical Topics 44(1) (2016): 75–125.

17. Colin McLear, ‘Kant on Animal Consciousness’, Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 11 (15) (2011).

18. See my Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), ch. 5.