Some JVB

Jill Vance Buroker in her introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason:


a. Introduction to transcendental logic (A50-66/B74-91)

Kant describes transcendental logic as the science of the rules of the pure understanding required fro cognition. This conception presupposes two distinctions: first, between the understanding and the sensibility; and second, between the real as opposed to logical uses of the understanding. Kant first reminds us that understanding and sensibility play distinct roles in knowledge. Sensibility is merely passive capacity for receiving impression s through the senses. The understanding, by contrast, is a spontaneous power to think of objects through concepts. THus each capacity has a disticnt function and produces a characteristic type of representation. Sensations given in intuition and the concepts that depend on them are empirical representations known a posteriori. The pure forms of intuition and the pure concepts arising solely from the activity of the understanding (if there are any) are a priori representations. Just as pure intuition represents only formal features of sensible objects, pure concepts would represent only the most general features thougtht in any idea of an object.