Assessing Kant's Master Argument: a review essay on Robert Howell's Kant's Transcendental Deduction

Robert Howell's Kant's Transcendental Deduction is one of the most impressive works ever produced on the Transcendental Deduction in particular, and on Kant's metaphysics and epistemology more generally. Howell's main project is to set out the possible interpretations of the first half of Kant's B-Deduction, distinguishing the possible readings of its premises, and then to evaluate the resulting versions of this argument. The ambiguities derive, for example, from Kant's lack of clarity as to the sort of necessity being invoked and what its scope is to be, the type of self-knowledge at issue in discussions of apperception, and the notion of 'object' at play in claims about knowledge of objects. Ambiguities of these kinds have often been noted, but Howell's work is unique in its rigor in fleshing them out, and in its command of analytical tools in realizing this aim. His overall assessment is negative; in his view every interpretation of the Deduction is beset by insuperable difficulties. The permanent benefit of the Deduction does not lie in the success of Kant's argument, but in the "depth of his insights and the immense fertility of his views," and indeed "the arguments and ideas it suggests ... go as deep, and ramify as widely, as any other arguments and ideas in philosophy" (p. 335).