The Unity of Cognition and the Subjectivist vs. “Transformative” Approaches to the B-Deduction, or, How to Read the Leitfaden (A79)

Abstract

In the context of a critique of James Conant's important new reading of the main argument of the Deduction, I present my current, most detailed interpretation of the well-known Leitfaden passage at A79, which in my view has been misinterpreted by a host of prominent readers. This new account expands on the account of the Leitfaden I gave in Chapter 5 of Kant's Deduction From Apperception. While I agree with Conant's critique of what he calls the 'layer-cake' reading of the Deduction argument, in this new account I make clearer my position on why the unity of judgement, in which concepts and intuitions are a priori synthetically unified, is wholly determined in virtue of the unity of apperception as the unitary function of the understanding, without this leading to a strong form of conceptualism such as that of Conant and others.