In keeping with the general theme of his book Graham Bird offers a non-traditionalist, or ‘revolutionary’ reading of Kant's Analytic of Concepts. Here we shall be concerned with Bird's commentary on some of the most dense and controversial passages in the Critique, namely those relating to the Metaphysical Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, and the notorious Transcendental Deduction. Bird's commentary is impressive, both in its interpretative momentum and its attention to detail, and I cannot hope to cover all of the contributions he has made to an analysis of Kant's position. Because of this, in what follows I shall be concerned to highlight what seem to me to be the elements most essential to his reformist interpretation of Kant's aims. It should be noted, in this regard, that Bird's analyses are not merely exegetical examinations of Kant's Critique, but include detailed and sensitive evaluations of other contemporary interpretations, as well as discussions of related issues that have come to be accepted in the secondary literature on Kant. Here again, however, I shall be most concerned to give the reader a general sense of those aspects of Bird's commentary which illuminate what he takes to be the revolutionary nature of Kant's project.

One of Bird's essential contributions to the examination of the Analytic of Concepts has to do with his effort to clarify what he takes to be the general purpose of Kant's arguments, both in the Metaphysical and the Transcendental Deductions. Against ‘traditionalist’ tendencies to view Kant's aim (especially in the Transcendental Deduction) as foremost an attempt to challenge or refute scepticism, Bird contends that Kant's own revolutionary project, as ‘a descriptive metaphysics of experience’, does not straightforwardly address traditional scepticism, and in this Bird goes against those accounts which take Kant's principal goal to be that of refuting a set of very general (or ‘philosophical’) doubts about knowledge, and/or to guarantee scientific and common-sense beliefs against the sceptical challenge (230–1). Bird does not claim that Kant's arguments do not relate to sceptical concerns; rather, his claim is that Kant's attitude towards scepticism is considerably more nuanced than has traditionally been appreciated. In this, Bird's own interpretation is also very nuanced. As we shall see, Bird's consideration of these issues leads him to argue for a more ‘modest’ interpretation of Kant's anti-scepticism than is oftentimes offered.

To begin, Bird distinguishes between a variety of sceptical concerns, each of which has been attributed to Kant. First, as above, Bird wants to reject one common assumption, to wit, that Kant's project ought to be viewed as a response to a general scepticism concerning knowledge. On Bird's view, Kant is first and foremost concerned to secure the credentials necessary for philosophy to get under way, and this interest goes hand in hand with Kant's revolutionary project. Towards this, the idea that Kant's philosophy starts by accepting a general sceptical challenge to knowledge and proceeds by demonstrating (by transcendental argument) that such scepticism can be decisively overcome is wrong-headed. Bird notes that Kant summarily dismisses precisely such idle or philosophical sceptical beginnings. This dismissal can be seen in a number of Kant's works. In the Logic, for example, Kant argues against the ‘principle of doubt, consisting in the maxim of considering knowledge with the aim of … showing the impossibility of certainty’ (9: 83–4).Footnote 1 On Bird's reading, Kant is not concerned to refute this kind of radicalized scepticism as it may apply to any or all knowledge claims. Indeed, on Bird's account, Kant already accepts knowledge in the sciences.Footnote 2 In Bird's words, ‘Kant … does not think that the sciences need to be justified against traditional philosophical scepticism, and regards a nonspecific scepticism about experience as idle’ (347).

The problem, then, is more limited, and relates specifically to the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, and the need for establishing the authority of reason in the first place. In this, Bird notes that both traditional dogmatists (rationalist metaphysicians) and sceptical empiricists are aligned in the view, presumably characteristic of ‘school metaphysics’, that the task is to adjudicate between two mutually exclusive accounts of the relation between the subjective and the objective spheres. Whereas the dogmatist asserts claims that would need to apply to things in themselves, the sceptic (in his own ‘dogmatic’ way) denies the legitimacy of such assertions. Bird correctly notes that Kant rejects each of these views. Indeed, the assumed disjunction between the claims of the dogmatists and the sceptical empiricists generates precisely the ‘mock combat’ characteristic of the antinomic confrontations in the Transcendental Dialectic. More importantly for Bird's account is Kant's Critical approach to these kinds of issues. Specifically, Kant is interested in examining the authority of either side to make its claims, and to investigate the efficacy of philosophy. In Bird's words, Kant's view is that ‘philosophy cannot proceed in its customary way until its credentials and authority have been properly examined in a comparison between science and philosophy’ (231).

Although Bird rejects the notion that Kant is concerned to refute general (‘philosophical’) scepticism, he emphasizes that Kant is nevertheless committed to a sceptical method, which involves a suspension of judgement until the proper use of reason and philosophy can be ascertained. The sceptical method, then, is used by Kant to investigate the sources of claims on either side (but especially in rationalist metaphysics), with the aim of arriving at certainty as to the legitimacy of our manner of proceeding (232–4). On Bird's view this again links up with Kant's reformist project in philosophy.

It is important to note that Bird admits that there are some forms of scepticism explicitly addressed by Kant. In other words, despite the fact that he (Bird) rejects any reading which views Kant's arguments as responses to the most general or philosophical (idle) scepticism outlined above, he does think that various portions of Kant's text do target certain specific forms of scepticism found in the tradition. Most notably, as we shall see, Bird argues that Kant is concerned in the Transcendental Deduction with what we might call a scepticism about knowledge and objective reality. Bird distinguishes this variety of scepticism from that later addressed in the Refutation of Idealism (an idealist scepticism about the external world), and he also distinguishes this from that Humean scepticism specifically about causality in the Second Analogy. Bird is assiduous in distinguishing between these different variants of ‘scepticism’, and to note the ways in which Kant addresses (or does not) these in various arguments in the Critique. Even in these cases, however, Bird wants to press a reformist and revolutionary interpretation of Kant's responses to sceptical challenges. For one thing, these various sceptical concerns appear to issue from precisely the kind of traditional philosophy Kant rejects. Implicit in each of these seems to be the distinction between subjective ideas or mental states on the one hand, and a transcendent realm of ‘things in themselves’ on the other (xii). Given this starting point, Kant's arguments have often been read as efforts to defend or guarantee our beliefs against the spectre of scepticism. Bird disagrees. Rather than providing a guarantee for our beliefs against sceptical challenges, Kant's project may in general be seen to aim at identifying the general a priori (transcendental) conditions that make such beliefs possible. And in this, Bird takes Kant's anti-scepticism to be more modest than is commonly thought. Anticipating his interpretation of Kant's views, Bird will argue for three essential points. First, Kant summarily dismisses the idle or ‘philosophical’ scepticism often thought to motivate his Critique. Second, Kant will be shown to accept provisionally an empiricist sceptical method in order to curb the metaphysical pretensions to transcendent knowledge adopted by the rationalist school. Finally, however, Kant will reject a ‘universal empiricism’ by defending and justifying the role that a priori concepts play in human experience (253).

Bird's analyses of the central arguments of the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions proceed against this general understanding of Kant's reformist project. The Transcendental Deduction understandably captures most of Bird's attention. However, there are a number of preliminary points concerning the Metaphysical Deduction that provide the basis for Bird's interpretation. The first has to do with Bird's understanding of the aim of the Metaphysical Deduction. It is well-known that in the Metaphysical Deduction Kant seems to be concerned to ‘derive’ the pure categories from the logical forms of judgement, and it is well-known, too, that there are a number of problems generated by such an attempt. Against many traditional readings of the Metaphysical Deduction, Bird denies that Kant is committed therein to showing (proving) that the categories in fact have the a priori necessary status ultimately granted them.Footnote 3 Rather than taking the Metaphysical Deduction to establish the a priori status of the categories, Bird suggests that Kant is merely attempting to provide a ‘principled’ basis for identifying the categories as a priori conditions, that is, identifying them as candidates for concepts having categorial status. In this, Kant is offering a prima-facie case for the claim that the categories are a priori by suggesting that they are derived from logical forms of judgement. However, on Bird's account (as we shall see) the actual demonstration that the categories (in general) are a priori is not provided until the later Transcendental Deduction. Indeed, Bird contends that, in order to prove that the categories are a priori, Kant needs to establish that the forms of judgement themselves are a priori, something he thinks does not get accomplished until the Transcendental Deduction.Footnote 4

One of the important features of Bird's interpretation of the Critique, then, relates to his rendering of the overarching strategy of the Analytic of Concepts taken as a whole. Rather than reading the Metaphysical Deduction and the Transcendental Deduction as self-contained arguments, these are to be viewed as stages in one extended argument designed to prove the existence and the immanent role of a priori concepts in experience. In fact, this line of argument culminates in the Analytic of Principles, where Kant will attempt to justify the synthetic a priori principles associated with the specific categories whose role is adumbrated in the Transcendental Deduction. In this sense, the Metaphysical Deduction ‘contributes’ to Kant's aim of isolating the a priori elements that issue solely from the understanding, but does not by itself establish the conclusion that they are. The explicit goal of the Transcendental Deduction on this view is to respond not to any general (idealist) scepticism about the existence of external objects, but rather to that more specific (empiricist) scepticism about the existence and role of a priori concepts (278). In this, Bird rejects any reading of the Analytic of Concepts which imports the traditional ‘dualist’ presupposition as the basis for Kant's arguments. Bird argues, in this connection, that in this way Kant must be viewed as providing a response to the (Humean) empiricist claim that all of our knowledge can be traced back to sensory experience.

The Transcendental Deduction is a notoriously difficult part of Kant's text, and it is complicated by the fact that Kant rewrote the arguments for the second edition. Commentators are divided on whether or not the original (A edition) version and the later (B edition) version of the arguments contained therein are consistent, and commentators are also divided about which (if either) of the versions is superior. To complicate matters, there appears to be no general consensus on what either version of the Deduction, taken in its own right, is exactly designed to prove.Footnote 5 Although Bird provides a careful commentary on each of these versions, he argues persuasively that the two versions of the argument are indeed consistent, even if the argumentative strategies differ.Footnote 6 Following Bird, I shall focus primarily on the B edition version of the argument(s).

As noted above, Bird contends that it is not until the Transcendental Deduction that Kant establishes that the forms of judgement are a priori, and in this he rejects those traditional interpretations of the Metaphysical Deduction which take the latter to have already demonstrated the a priori status of the categories. On Bird's view an argument for the apriority of the forms of judgement provides the starting place for the Transcendental Deduction. More specifically, Bird contends that the characterization of forms of judgement as a priori is to be found in opening sections of the Transcendental Deduction (B edition), where Kant argues that combination and its necessary unity cannot be given through objects (cannot have an empirical origin):

Bird correctly notes that the B Deduction proceeds by linking up this general requirement with both the categories’ role in constituting experience and the attachment of this with the doctrine of transcendental apperception (297). In other words, the B Deduction gets its momentum from the finding that transcendental apperception is an a priori condition of the understanding and thought: ‘Just as all sense experience is subject to space and time, so combination requires that all representations are subject to conditions of a transcendental apperception which is our ability to combine or judge’ (298).

The doctrine of transcendental apperception is announced in the B Deduction by the famous passage that:

It is well-known that Kant commits himself to both the unity and identity of the ‘I’ of apperception. Very briefly (and I assume uncontroversially) he claims that experience requires that my representations must be able to be connected to the same, identical ‘I’. The essential point is that Kant is interested in demonstrating the necessity of a conceptual unity for experience. Although this is a well-accepted point, Bird argues against traditional ways in which it has been understood. This has implications for a number of issues confronting readers of the Deduction, and I can only hope to highlight a few of the topics addressed by Bird. One such issue has to do with the traditional assumption that Kant is deploying the theory of apperception and the correlative categorical determinations in order to show that the categories provide both necessary and sufficient conditions of objectivity. Citing the well-known Kantian definition of an object in the Deduction (‘an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united’: B137), Bird notes that the unity of consciousness for Kant provides a necessary condition of objective validity; such a unity of consciousness, that is, provides a necessary condition which enables us to talk about objectivity (298). In this, Bird agrees with many traditional views according to which the categories are objectivating conditions, but he argues that these are merely necessary but not sufficient conditions of objectivity (298). More importantly, on Bird's view the notion of an object relates only to an undifferentiated manifold of intuition, one which does not imply that ‘objectivity’ only applies in the argument to outer objects. Instead, Kant is here offering an account according to which ‘objectivity’ (or any objective judgement) is grounded in certain a priori transcendental conditions regardless of whether we are talking about inner or outer objects. This in turn allows Bird to contend that the Deduction is not concerned to refute the sceptical challenge about the external world or external objects or persons (320). Here again, Kant's aims are taken to be much more modest than has oftentimes been assumed, and reflect an interest in demonstrating only how categories (if there are any) could apply to experience in a way that is compatible with their apriority and their independence from the senses (320). Kant is not, that is, adopting the traditional distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ objects and seeking to bridge the epistemological gap that opens up from the assumption of a dualist premise and which grounds a sceptical worry.

The upshot is that Bird offers what he takes to be a ‘modest’ account of the Transcendental Deduction, and this modest account contrasts with the traditional or what Bird refers to as an ‘ambitious’ account. The so-called ambitious account deals with ‘the specific concepts listed in the Metaphysical Deduction and offers to prove both their a priority and their actual application, their objective reality, in experience’ (320). Bird notes that proponents of this ambitious interpretation traditionally advance the view that a priori necessities (the role of the categories) are to provide guarantees against a sceptic of the truth of our beliefs about external objects and persons. In other words, the traditionalist view, on Bird's account, is supposed to be providing a kind of transcendental argument against either scepticism in general or an idealist scepticism in particular concerning the existence or knowledge of an external world. Bird rejects this, both as a representation of Kant's general aims in the Deduction, but also in its particular claims.

On Bird's ‘revolutionary’ interpretation, the Deduction is (more modestly) not designed to justify/demonstrate the role of specific categories as they relate to/apply to experience. Instead, the aim of the argument is to show only how/that any category as a priori, or completely independent from the senses, could so apply. In Bird's words:

It is thus that Bird takes the Deduction to supply reasons why the categories (any category, in general) are only necessary but not sufficient conditions of experience. In keeping with this line of argument, the Deduction is not to be viewed as an attempt to guarantee our experience against traditional scepticism. Such a view significantly deviates from many traditional interpretations insofar as it limits the scope of the Deduction, and provides a preliminary (albeit essential) step in an extended argument for the immanent role pure (non-empirical) concepts play in constituting experience.Footnote 8 The task, once again, of demonstrating the ultimate role of particular concepts gets played out on Bird's view only in the Analytic of Principles. In other words, the Deduction is not ‘directed at traditional scepticism about external objects or persons but at a more general objectivity concerning the transcendental conditions under which we can express judgments as evaluable as true or false’ (320).

The above discussion merely highlights some of the ways in which Bird's defence of Kant as a ‘reformist’ undercuts many of the elements thought to be perplexing or inconsistent in Kant's philosophy. Against ‘traditional’ readings, Bird repeatedly aims at elucidating the fundamental role of Kant's task, its formal (not metaphysical) interest in demonstrating the existence and role of concepts having no source in experience as nevertheless making an essential contribution to experience. Throughout his discussions Bird's analyses reject frequently discussed ‘problems’ thought to plague the Deduction. These include the relation between the subjective and objective Deductions, the concern on the part of commentators about whether Kant is talking about logical or ‘weighty’ objects, etc. The ongoing debate about whether Kant's ‘true self’ is the phenomenal or the ‘noumenal’ self is yet another example of a misreading of Kant's view. It has been thought, for example, that Kant's claim in the Deduction that we can only know ourselves as we ‘appear’ to ourselves opens the floodgates to a complementary transcendent doctrine of selfhood.

Bird's interpretation allows for an understanding of Kant's arguments which accomplishes two things. First, it illuminates and defends the positive reformist project motivating Kant's philosophy. Second, it allows us to avoid those specific controversies that stem from inflated or overly ambitious assumptions about what it is that Kant is trying to do. On this score, Bird suggests that traditionalist readings are oftentimes the source of problems which have only been imported into the Critique (and ascribed to Kant) by commentators who have misconstrued Kant's real aims. More specifically, many of the difficulties found in Kant's text reflect commentators’ implicit acceptance of the ‘school metaphysics’ and the legacy of residual Cartesian dualism that Kant was interested in rejecting from the outset.

It might seem to some that Bird's interpretation of Kant's arguments fails to address the most pressing need to overcome idealist sceptical concerns, or fails to guarantee our beliefs against all sceptical idealist challenges. This complaint, however, does and can only issue from a presumption about what it is that Kant was and ought to be doing relative to the traditional framework. In Bird's words, ‘Bewilderment on the part of traditionalist commentators that Kant should so casually dismiss their idealist framework is matched by an equal bewilderment on Kant's part that that framework and its supposed problems should be accepted as either obligatory or legitimate’ (386).