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227 Notes to Introduction 1. For Hume, vividness is what causes us to believe in the existence of the object. He writes, “the force and vivacity of the perception . . . constitute in the mind what we call the belief in the existence of any object” (Hume 1973, 153; Treatise, bk. 1, pt. 3, section 13). 2. The reverse implication also holds. Intersubjective agreement points to reality . See Kant 1955d, §18; Ak. 3:297–98. 3. Having something as a human possibility does not, of course, mean that a person possesses its actuality. Seeing the other playing an instrument, for example , does not mean I am at once capable of playing this instrument. It does, however, inform me that this is a human capacity that I might, through appropriate training, also develop. 4. Heraclitus, the original philosopher of the nonmanifest, expressed this in terms of the soul: “You would not find out the boundaries of soul, even by traveling along every path: so deep a measure does it have” (fragment 45, in Kirk and Raven 1966, 205). Notes to Chapter One 1. In his words, combination, “being an act of the self-activity of the subject, cannot be executed save by the subject itself” (Kant 1955c, B131; Ak. 3:107). 2. As Kant puts this conclusion, inherently, “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious [of itself] solely [as conscious] of its power of combination; but in respect of the manifold which it has to combine I am subjected to a limiting condition (entitled inner sense), namely that this combination can be made intuitable only according to the relations of time, which lie entirely outside the Notes 2 2 8 N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 0 – 2 5 concepts of the understanding. Such an intelligence, therefore, can know itself only as it appears to itself” (ibid., B158–59; Ak. 3:124). 3. Because of this, Kant asserts that the unity of the actual subject is not that of the category of unity. The categories are rules for combination; thus, the category of unity presupposes combination (Kant 1955c, B131; Ak. 3:108). 4. This act of reproduction is to be distinguished from the “reproductive imagination , whose synthesis is entirely subject to empirical laws, the laws, namely, of association, and which therefore contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge” (Kant 1955c, B152; Ak. 3:120). The act is actually productive, that is, generative of time in the distinction of its moments. It thus first generates the elements that can be associated. Without the act, no knowledge (a priori or empirical) is possible. 5. There is an easy way to symbolize this process. Suppose I have an original impression, I1. As I advance to the next impression I2, the first is reproduced. Letting pairs of brackets symbolize reproduction, this advance can be symbolized as I2[I1]. Similarly, the advance to the next impression I3 would be symbolized as I3[I2[I1]]. We thus have the series, I1, I2[I1], I3[I2[I1]] . . ., which can be thought of as continuing as long as we hold the individual impressions, I1, I2, I3, . . . as part of a “complete presentation.” 6. Husserl gives a phenomenological parallel of Kant’s position in his description of how “the identical intentional ‘predicates’ evidently separates itself from the changing and variable predicates.” He calls this object “the ‘identical,’ ‘the determinable subject of its possible predicates’ — ‘the pure X in abstraction from its possible predicates’” (Husserl 1976, 302). 7. As Kant’s example of grasping a triangle indicates, not every synthesis of recognition in a concept yields the sense of time as enduring. Thus, the synthesis that generates the triangle by “the combination of three straight lines according to a rule” does not posit the real in time (Kant 1955c, A105; Ak. 4:80). The x here is nontemporal. Only when the synthesized representations have distinct temporal positions can a sense of enduring obtain. 8. It does this by generating the sequence that we have symbolized in note 5 as I3[I2[I1]]. 9. One sign of this is that it reappears when Kant replaces the threefold synthesis of the A deduction with his account of the figurative synthesis (B152). It now appears in the relation between outer and inner sense. As Hoke Robinson notes, there are two “contradictory . . . theses, both of which Kant appears to hold.” The first is that the “time-determination of outer sense is prior to the...

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