Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (review)

In the Preface to his impressive and engaging new commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, Jay Rosenberg informs us that the book is both a product of his own lectures and a “direct descendent of Wilfrid Sellars’ legendary introduction to Kant” (vi). Its origins in the classroom give Accessing Kant a refreshingly pedagogical tone. Throughout, Rosen-berg—who was a student of Sellars’ at the University of Pittsburgh—makes felicitous use of clear examples, familiar problems and authors, and visual aids to clarify “the Big Picture” operating in the first Critique. Mercifully, however, his style owes little to Sellars’ own brutally opaque prose.

Rosenberg also shares his teacher’s enthusiasm for the history of philosophy. The reader will not find Rosenberg sloughing off Kant’s “lesser predecessors” in the manner of P. F. Strawson. However, the history on display in Accessing Kant has more to do with the curricular demands of English-speaking philosophy departments than with Kant’s own intellectual and cultural context. This means that his Kant argues across the ages with giants rather than with his peers in Halle and Berlin. Nor, despite the occasional reference to Kant’s handwritten marginalia, does Rosenberg devote any effort to tracing the internal development of Kant’s thought. He does not consider whether insight might be gained from looking at particular problems in the light of the Dissertation (1770), for example, or of Kant’s polemics against Eberhard in On a Discovery (1790). The Prolegomena gets described as “not particularly helpful for understanding the First Critique, especially the difficult bits” (3n). Yet Rosenberg’s “whirlwind tour of the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Hume” (10) is sophisticated and compelling, despite its brevity and “relaxed” style. Tough-minded historicists may resist the idea that Kant’s question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” is just another version of the “Pythagorean puzzle” regarding the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world. But if one grants the reasonable assumption that important philosophical work often transcends the context of its production, one will appreciate the concision of his historical discussions as well as the lack of clutter.

The substantive claims Rosenberg makes about the first Critique register his Sellarsian heritage as well. He finds Kant responding most directly to the problems of Hume’s “Concept Empiricism,” rather than, say, his skepticism. Kant is concerned to show that empiricist theories cannot explain either the coherence of perceptual experience (our ability to perceive particulars as instances of universals) or the legitimacy of the synthetic a priori judgments (which Rosenberg calls “every-must judgments”) that underwrite our cognitive practices. According to Rosenberg, Kant’s solution to the problems of Concept Empiricism stems from the commitments expressed in his claim that “the same function that gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B104–05). Particularly important here are two main ideas. One is that possession of a concept amounts to possession of the ability to apply it in a judgment. Concepts “rest on” those functions of the understanding that supply propositional form. The other is that the ability to intuit particular items in space (and time) requires the ability to draw on concepts. Thus, to perceive something as an instance of a general concept (as a chair, for example) is to have an experience whose content can be articulated in the form of a judgment. This reading implies that the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity does not neatly parallel the distinction between understanding and sensibility. It is not merely that concepts must combine with intuitions in order to yield cognition, but that the capacity to intuit must already involve the understanding (qua “faculty of rules”). Properly understood, these ideas provide the key to understanding the central claims of the Transcendental Analytic.

Rosenberg’s admirable reconstruction of this difficult line of thought is the heart of...