In Alison Laywine's review of Henry Allison's recent book on Kant's Transcendental Deduction,Footnote ¹ Laywine worries that Allison loses perspective as he surveys Kant's pre-Critical writings and comments on his Deduction. Laywine writes, ‘[W]e may see everything there is to see of a passing landscape, from the window of our train, as we travel from one city to another, without fully understanding the historical or geographical significance of the region through which we are making our way’.Footnote ² Laywine's own new book on Kant's Deduction analyzes Kant's Duisburg Nachlass of 1775 in Chapter 1, then discusses the main topics in his B-Deduction – synthesis and apperception in Chapter 2, objectivity and judgment in Chapter 3, the figurative synthesis in space and time in Chapter 4, and the paradox of self-knowledge in Chapter 5 – and concludes by reflecting on the Analytic of Principles. But Laywine never loses perspective. She convincingly shows how Kant's Deduction – specifically, his proof that the understanding prescribes laws to nature – transforms and completes his early cosmological project of identifying the system of relations constitutive of the world as such (pp. 12-13).

Laywine introduces Kant's early project by focusing on two sets of commitments from his Duisburg Nachlass. The first concerns external relations and their grounding. Laywine argues that in 1775 Kant held that ‘we can represent an object according to its relations only’ (p. 28), and that we do so by an ‘exposition of appearances’, whereby we ‘set out these relations as special cases of a rule or principle’ (p. 41), much as a geometrical proof sets out a figure as a representative instance of a rule. Laywine argues that Kant held that this rule or principle must be grounded in the thinking subject's relations to itself and its representations, (p. 43) which the subject can directly introspect (p. 41).

The second set of commitments concerns the conditions of the possibility of a world. Laywine argues that in 1755 Kant held that for a priori knowledge to be possible, ‘we must form a connected whole out of our perceptions’ (p. 51). This connected world-whole is what Lawyine calls ‘a cosmology of experience’ (p. 51). Kant held that we can form such a world-whole, according to Laywine, only if there is a common ground of appearances (p. 64), and that this common ground is the thinking subject, which is a ‘rational substance’ (p. 69) that is able to ‘take command of appearances’ (p. 77) through its functions of thinking.

Laywine acknowledges that by 1781 Kant repudiates many of his earlier commitments: he no longer holds that the thinking subject is a rational substance (pp. 77-78); he denies that the subject can directly introspect its functions of thinking (p. 78); and, he no longer assumes without argument that these functions have a legitimate application to appearances (p. 45). Nevertheless, Laywine's argument is that Kant's Deduction still provides a cosmology of experience, and that it does so through something like an exposition of appearances.

Lawyine follows Dieter Henrich in interpreting Kant's B-Deduction as one proof in two steps.Footnote ³ According to Lawyine, the first step investigates the nature of thinking, while the second provides a cosmology of experience (p. 86). A worry, though, is that if the Deduction's aim is to provide a cosmology of experience, and if the first step investigates the nature of thinking only, while the second provides the cosmology of experience, then the second step would suffice alone for the Deduction's proof, and while the first may be a necessary precursor to the Deduction's proof – much as the Metaphysical Deduction is – it would not provide a necessary argument that is integral to the Deduction's proof itself. This aside, Laywine's discussion of the first step offers intriguing interpretations of synthesis, apperception, objectivity, and judgment, and her discussion of its second step provides a compelling interpretation of the figurative synthesis in space and time. I will focus my review on these topics.

Laywine interprets synthesis as the activity of construing a manifold as an object, for example, construing a manifold of shadows and light as a sloth in dense foliage (pp. 97-98). She interprets apperception as our ability to give an account of this synthetic activity (pp. 102-103). A worry about this interpretation is that in order to give an account of our synthetic activity, we would need to have self-conscious awareness of the manifold that we synthesize independently of our synthesizing it, and yet it is synthesis that makes self-conscious awareness possible.

As for objectivity, Laywine adduces the following argument for idealism: ‘If we are challenged to show that the object really does correspond to our knowledge, and yet treat it independently of the knowledge we have, we will have denied ourselves the means of answering the challenge. We cannot, as it were, set the object and our knowledge side by side and compare. A challenge to show that the object corresponds to our knowledge is, in fact, a challenge to show that what we say about the object is true. The only way to meet such a challenge is to confront our claims with genuine items of knowledge that have withstood such tests in the past’ (pp. 131-32) Laywine concludes that ‘the object as an object of knowledge is not something other than or different from knowledge, but somehow its internal byproduct’ (p. 141). Given this conception of objectivity, Laywine contends that if the B-Deduction's first step can show that the categories make our knowledge possible, then Kant will be entitled to conclude that the categories make the objects of our knowledge possible.

Kant argues for this, according to Laywine, by considering judgment, specifically, what makes judgment ‘objective’. He does so, according to Lawyine, by contrasting judgments with merely subjective associations of ideas and free-floating concepts (p. 173). Laywine argues that since judgments and free-floating concepts both involve logical relations among concepts, judgments must involve a distinctive logical relation. This relation, Laywine argues, must be the ‘objective unity of apperception’ (p. 184), since for judgments to be objective is for them to possess a truth-value, and truth consists not in correspondence to mind-independent reality, but rather in the unity of apperception itself (pp. 184-88).

I have two worries about this argument. The first is that while according to Laywine the unity of apperception makes judgments objective, for Kant it is intuitions that present us with objects. So, while the unity of apperception is surely necessary for judgments to be objective, it cannot suffice alone, since some relation to intuitions must also be necessary. The second worry concerns the argument for idealism Laywine attributes to Kant. Karl Ameriks has coined the term ‘short arguments to idealism’ for arguments that base idealism on ‘the mere notion of representation, or on such very general features as the passivity or activity involved in representation’, and Ameriks has argued that Kant's own arguments for idealism ‘rest, first, on a series of complex considerations entailing the ideality of space and time, and, secondly, on an equally complex series of considerations requiring that all our theoretical knowledge is limited to spatio-temporal determinations’.Footnote ⁴ The worry for Laywine, then, is that while the argument for idealism she attributes to Kant concerns the possibility of knowledge in general, Kant's own arguments for idealism make essential reference to space and time.

The most original and compelling interpretation I think Laywine offers is in her account of the figurative synthesis in space and time. According to Laywine, Kant argues in the B-Deduction's second step that we cannot have empirical knowledge (or even empirical concepts), without having a conception of how the objects of our knowledge (and of our concepts) fit together with all the other possible objects in the knowable world (pp. 214-16). In this way, Laywine argues, Kant's B-Deduction takes up his earlier project of a cosmology of experience. Kant's B-Deduction aims to provide this cosmology through what Laywine calls a ‘cartography of the sensible world’ (p. 231). Kant argues that we represent the objects of our knowledge alongside all the other objects of our possible knowledge, according to Laywine, by orienting the objects of our knowledge in our a priori intuitions of space and time (pp. 216-22). She explains that perception is ‘not a passive taking-in of what is going on around us’ but rather ‘a self-active attempt to construe the manifold given to us […]: it is image production’ (p. 242), and that in order for this empirical image-making to be possible, we must orient our perceptions in the a priori images of space and time themselves (pp. 240-42). In this way, Laywine contends, ‘the pure synthesized intuitions of [space and time] make nature possible’ (p. 246).

The categories are required for this ‘cartography of the sensible world’, Laywine contends, since while the a priori images of space and time enable us to form images of objects, ‘an image all by itself is not knowledge of anything’ (p. 262). For empirical knowledge to be possible, then, the a priori images of space and time must themselves be represented according to the laws of the understanding, so that when we orient the objects of our knowledge in the a priori images of space and time, the objects of our knowledge are thereby represented under the categories. Laywine likens the way that the objects of our knowledge come to be represented under the categories by being represented in the a priori image of space and time to Kant's early conception of an ‘exposition of appearances’, where appearances are set out as instances of a general rule. Laywine explains, ‘Once the categories have been schematized and stated as the universal laws of nature […] they can relate to objects of knowledge in just the way that the enunciation of a proposition in classical geometry […] will relate to an object of knowledge’ (p. 262).

This completes Laywine's argument for the thesis of her book: the B-Deduction provides a cosmology of experience – by representing the objects of our knowledge as belonging to a whole of nature in space and time – and it does so by something like an exposition of appearances, where each particular object of our knowledge is set out in the a priori image of space and time as an instance of a general rule of the understanding.