“ The Unity of Time ’ s Measure ”

According to Kant, the understanding generates concepts in virtue of its own capacity to judge (A69/B94), but knowledge requires the application of concepts to what is given by the sensible faculty. His Transcendental Deduction is intended to show that the Categories, concepts that express the unity required for objective judgment, apply to all objects given in sensible intuition. In the Critique’s second (1787, “B”) edition, Kant divides this argument into two stages. The first, consisting of six numbered sections (§§15–20), is intended to show that the categories and thereby a “necessary unity of self-consciousness” must apply to any manifold “contained in an intuition that I call mine”. Kant indicates that this result is only preliminary, because the argument behind it “abstract[s] from the way in which the manifold for an empirical intuition is given” (§21, B144). So in the remaining six sections (§§21–26), it must be shown “from the way in which the empirical intuition is given in sensibility that its unity can be none other than the one” expressed by the categories (B145, emphasis added). Kant scholars, holding a position staked by Dieter Henrich in his (1968), insist that an adequate interpretation of the Deduction must distinguish the stages’ goals and fit them into a unified argument. At the end of the argument’s second stage, Kant recapitulates its strategy. The conclusion, that the synthetic unity with which objects are given in intuition “can be none other than” that expressed by the categories, rests on the thesis that “unity of the synthesis of the manifold ... is already given” a priori along with the intuitions of space and time (§26, B161, emphasis added). The argument thus turns on consideration of the synthesis1 (operation of the mind) responsible for the unity with which space and time are represented.2 It appears to turn,