A Deduction from Apperception?

I discuss three elements of Dennis Schulting’s new book on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories. First, that Schulting gives a detailed account of the role of each individual category. Second, Schulting’s insistence that the categories nevertheless apply ‘en bloc’. Third, Schulting’s defence of Kant’s so-called reciprocity thesis that subjective unity of consciousness and objectivity in the sense of cognition’s objective purport are necessary conditions for the possibility of one another. I endorse these fascinating but unfashionable claims and sketch my own version of what they amount to, which is quite different to Schulting’s own construal. I point to some fundamental limitations and problems for Schulting’s position and argue that his project needs to be reshaped or at least reconceived in the face of them. Even if Schulting’s argument is sound, it does not provide a deduction, properly speaking, of the categories. Dennis Schulting has written a highly original book on that most scrutinized and controversial of philosophical arguments, Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. The book is tightly focused, tightly argued, and although it is often difficult it is also admirably clear. Schulting claims to find in the so-called first step of the Deduction a derivation of each of the twelve categories from a single principle, the formal ‘I think’ or the pure original unity of apperception. There is much in Schulting’s book worthy of close critical attention but here I want to focus on three aspects I find especially striking. First, its detailed discussion of all of the categories. In this Schulting takes his lead from Klaus