Categories versus Schemata: Kant’s Two-Aspect Theory of Pure Concepts and his Critique of Wolffian Metaphysics

Challenging the common view that categories are prior to schemata, I argue that Kant considers transcendental schemata and categories to represent different guises of the a priori rules that allow the mind to unify a manifold. Since only transcendental schemata present these rules as ways of unifying successive representations, they can be said to constitute the sensible condition of any a priori cognition of objects. I take Kant to argue, on this basis, that Wolffian metaphysics abstracted from this condition, thus unwarrantedly using categories to obtain a priori knowledge of the soul, the world as such and God.