Critique of Pure Reason Essay

Immanuel Kant (17241804) is the central figure in ripe ism. He synthesized early modern dexterousism and empiricism, set the terms for oftentimes of nineteenth and twentieth century ism, and continues to exercise a momentous influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political school of apprehension, aesthetics, and other fields. The first harmonic idea of Kants critical philosophy especi eachy in his one-third retrospects the reassessment of dainty Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) is humans autonomy.He argues that the human sympathy is the book of facts of the oecumenic laws of record that soci competent system all our experience and that human effort gives itself the moralistic law, which is our basis for legal opinion in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific k in a flashledge, morality, and phantasmal mental picture atomic number 18 mutually consisten t and secure because they all rest on the same root of human autonomy, which is as well as the final end of nature according to the teleological beingness observe of hypothecateing judgment that Kant introduces to unify the suppositional and practical parts of his philosophical system.1. Life and deeds Immanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, near the southeastern brink of the Baltic Sea. Today Konigsberg has been renamed Kaliningrad and is part of Russia. muchoer during Kants life judgment of conviction Konigsberg was the capitol of East Prussia, and its dominant language was German. though geographically remote from the rest of Prussia and other German cities, Konigsberg was and then a major(ip) commercial center, an serious military port, and a relatively cosmopolitan university town.1 Kant was born into an artisan family of modest means. His father was a superior harness bookr, and his mother was the daughter of a harness maker, though she was better ed ucated than most women of her social class. Kants family was never destitute, but his fathers trade was in decline during Kants youth and his p arnts at times had to rely on extended family for financial support. Kants parents were Pietist and he attended a Pietist direct, the Collegium Fridericianum, from ages eight finished fifteen. religionism was an evangelical Lutheran movement that emphasized conversion, reliance on worshipful grace, the experience of religious emotions, and personal devotion involving regular Bible study, prayer, and introspection. Kant reacted strongly against the forced consciousness-searching to which he was subjected at the Collegium Fridericianum, in response to which he sought refuge in the Latin classics, which were central to the schools curriculum.Later the mature Kants emphasis on origin and autonomy, rather than emotion and dependance on either delegacy or grace, may in part reflect his youthful reply against Pietism. But although the youn g Kant loathed his Pietist schooling, he had deep respect and admiration for his parents, especially his mother, whose genuine religiosity he described as non at all enthusiastic. According to his biographer, Manfred Kuehn, Kants parents probably influenced him much less(prenominal) through their Pietism than through their artisan values of hard work, honesty, cleanliness, and independence, which they taught him by example. 2 Kant attended college at the University of Konigsberg, cognize as the Albertina, where his early interest in classics was quickly superseded by philosophy, which all get-go year students analyze and which encompassed mathematics and physics as well as logic, metaphysics, ethics, and natural law.Kants philosophy professors exposed him to the onslaught of Christian Wolff (16791750), whose critical synthesis of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz (16461716) was then very influential in German universities. But Kant was similarly exposed to a range of German and British critics of Wolff, and in that location were strong doses of Aristotelianism and Pietism represented in the philosophy faculty as well. Kants favorite teacher was Martin Knutzen (17131751), a Pietist who was heavily influenced by both(prenominal) Wolff and the English philosopher John Locke (16321704).Knutzen introduced Kant to the work of Isaac Newton (16421727), and his influence is visible in Kants first make work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747), which was a critical attempt to negotiate a dispute in natural philosophy between Leibnizians and Newtonians over the proper measurement of force. aft(prenominal) college Kant spent six long time as a private tutor to young children outside Konigsberg. By this time both of his parents had died and Kants finances were non yet secure enough for him to pursue an schoolman career.He finally re sour to Konigsberg in 1754 and began belief at the Albertina the following year. For the next four decades Kant taught philosophy there, until his seclusion from teaching in 1796 at the age of seventy-two. Kant had a burst of publishing activity in the historic period after he returned from working as a private tutor. In 1754 and 1755 he published three scientific works one of which, Universal congenital History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), was a major book in which, among other things, he developed what later became known as the nebular surmise about the influenceation of the solar system.Unfortunately, the printer went bankrupt and the book had little immediate impact. To secure qualifications for teaching at the university, Kant also wrote two Latin dissertations the first, en entitled Concise Outline of Some Reflections on extract (1755), earned him the Magister degree and the second, New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755), entitled him to teach as an unsalaried referee.The following year he published another Latin work, The Employment i n Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, of Which Sample I Contains the Physical Monadology (1756), in hopes of succeeding Knutzen as associate professor of logic and metaphysics, though Kant failed to secure this position. Both the New Elucidation, which was Kants first work concern in the first place with metaphysics, and the Physical Monadology further develop the position on the interaction of finite substances that he first depict in Living Forces. Both works depart from Leibniz-Wolffian views, though not radically.The New Elucidation in particular shows the influence of Christian August Crusius (17151775), a German critic of Wolff. 3 As an unsalaried lecturer at the Albertina Kant was paid directly by the students who attended his lectures, so he needed to teach an immense amount and to attract many students in order to earn a living. Kant held this position from 1755 to 1770, during which period he would lecture an average of twenty hours per week on lo gic, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as mathematics, physics, and physical geography.In his lectures Kant used textbooks by Wolffian authors much(prenominal) as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (17141762) and Georg Friedrich Meier (17181777), but he followed them loosely and used them to mental synthesis his own reflections, which force on a wide range of ideas of contemporary interest. These ideas often stemmed from British sentimentalist philosophers such as David Hume (17111776) and Francis Hutcheson (16941747), some of whose texts were translated into German in the mid-1750s and from the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778), who published a flurry of works in the early 1760s.From early in his career Kant was a popular and triple-crown lecturer. He also quickly developed a local reputation as a lustrous young in break upectual and cut a dashing figure in Konigsberg society. After several years of relative quiet, Kant unleashed another burst of publications in 176 21764, including five philosophical works. The False Subt permity of the Four syllogistic Figures (1762) rehearses criticisms of Aristotelian logic that were developed by other German philosophers.The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (17623) is a major book in which Kant drew on his primarily work in Universal History and New Elucidation to develop an genuine argument for Gods existence as a condition of the internal possibility of all things, while criticizing other arguments for Gods existence. The book attracted several positive and some negative reviews.In 1762 Kant also submitted an essay entitled Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality to a horn in competition by the Prussian Royal Academy, though Kants submission took second prize to Moses Mendelssohns winning essay (and was published with it in 1764). Kants Prize endeavor, as it is known, departs more signifi cannistertly from Leib niz-Wolffian views than his rather work and also contains his first extended discussion of moral philosophy in print.The Prize Essay draws on British sources to criticize German rationalism in two respects first, drawing on Newton, Kant distinguishes between the methods of mathematics and philosophy and second, drawing on Hutcheson, he claims that an unanalysable feeling of the faithful supplies the material sum of our moral obligations, which cannot be demonstrated in a purely intellectual way from the formal tenet of perfection alone (2299).4 These themes reappear in the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763), whose principal(prenominal) thesis, however, is that the real opposition of conflicting forces, as in causal proportions, is not reducible to the logical relation of contradiction, as Leibnizians held. In Negative Magnitudes Kant also argues that the morality of an action is a function of the internal forces that trigger one to act, rather than of the external (physical) actions or their consequences.Finally, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) deals mainly with so-called differences in the tastes of men and women and of people from different cultures. After it was published, Kant filled his own interleaved copy of this book with (often unrelated) written remarks, many of which reflect the deep influence of Rousseau on his designateing about moral philosophy in the mid-1760s. These works helped to secure Kant a broader reputation in Germany, but for the most part they were not strikingly real.Like other German philosophers at the time, Kants early works are generally concerned with using insights from British empiricist authors to reform or broaden the German rationalist tradition without radically undermining its foundations. part some of his early works tend to emphasize rationalist ideas, others have a more empiricist emphasis. During this time Kant was striving to w ork out an independent position, but forrader the 1770s his views remained fluid. In 1766 Kant published his first work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, which later became a central bailiwick of his mature philosophy.Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, which he wrote soon after publishing a piteous Essay on Maladies of the Mind (1764), was occasioned by Kants fascination with the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (16881772), who claimed to have insight into a spirit innovation that enabled him to make a series of apparently miraculous predictions. In this curious work Kant satirically compares Swedenborgs spirit-visions to the belief of rationalist metaphysicians in an immaterial soul that survives death, and he concludes that philosophical noesis of either is im achievable because human conclude is limited to experience.The skeptical tone of Dreams is tempered, however, by Kants suggestion that moral faith besides supports belief in an immaterial and immortal soul, even if it is not possible to attain metaphysical fellowship in this domain (2373). In 1770, at the age of forty-six, Kant was appointed to the soften in logic and metaphysics at the Albertina, after teaching for fifteen years as an unsalaried lecturer and working since 1766 as a sublibrarian to supplement his in love. Kant was turned down for the same position in 1758.But later, as his reputation grew, he declined chairs in philosophy at Erlangen (1769) and Jena (1770) in hopes of obtaining one in Konigsberg. After Kant was finally promoted, he step by step extended his repertoire of lectures to include anthropology (Kants was the first such course in Germany and became very popular), rational theology, pedagogy, natural right, and even mineralogy and military fortifications. In order to inaugurate his new position, Kant also wrote one more Latin dissertation Concerning the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (1770), which i s known as the inauguration Dissertation.The initiatory Dissertation departs more radically from both Wolffian rationalism and British sentimentalism than Kants earlier work. Inspired by Crusius and the Swiss natural philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert (17281777), Kant distinguishes between two fundamental powers of cognition, sensibility and discernment (intelligence), where the Leibniz-Wolffians regarded dread (intellect) as the lonesome(prenominal) fundamental power.Kant therefore rejects the rationalist view that sensibility is notwithstanding a confused species of intellectual cognition, and he replaces this with his own view that sensibility is distinct from understanding and brings to perception its own subjective forms of outer space and time a view that developed out of Kants earlier criticism of Leibnizs relative view of space in Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space (1768).Moreover, as the title of the Inaugural Dissertation indicates, Kant argues that sensibility and understanding are directed at two different realitys sensibility gives us access to the healthy world, while understanding enables us to grasp a distinct straightforward world. These two worlds are related in that what the understanding grasps in the distinct world is the paradigm of NOUMENAL PERFECTION, which is a common measure for all other things in so far as they are realities. Considered theoretically, this transparent paradigm of perfection is God considered practically, it is MORAL PERFECTION (2396).The Inaugural Dissertation thus develops a form of Platonism and it rejects the view of British sentimentalists that moral judgments are found on feelings of pleasure or pain, since Kant now holds that moral judgments are based on pure understanding alone. After 1770 Kant never surrendered the views that sensibility and understanding are distinct powers of cognition, that space and time are subjective forms of human sensibility, and that moral judgments are based on pure understanding (or reason) alone.But his embrace of Platonism in the Inaugural Dissertation was short-lived. He soon denied that our understanding is capable of insight into an intelligible world, which cleared the path toward his mature position in the Critique of virginal Reason (1781), according to which the understanding (like sensibility) supplies forms that structure our experience of the informed world, to which human knowledge is limited, while the intelligible (or noumenal) world is strictly unknowable to us.Kant spent a decade working on the Critique of Pure Reason and published nothing else of significance between 1770 and 1781. But its publication attach the beginning of another burst of activity that produced Kants most important and enduring works. Because early reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason were few and (in Kants judgment) uncomprehending, he tried to clarify its main points in the much shorter Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a acquirement (1783).Among the major books that rapidly followed are the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kants main work on the fundamental principle of morality the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), his main work on natural philosophy in what scholars call his critical period (17811798) the second and substantially revised edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), a fuller discussion of topics in moral philosophy that builds on (and in some ways revises) the Groundwork and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), which deals with aesthetics and teleology.Kant also published a number of important essays in this period, including Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784) and Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786), his main contributions to the philosophy of history An swear out to the Question What is Enlightenment? (17 84), which broaches some of the key ideas of his later political essays and What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in thinking? (1786), Kants intervention in the pantheism controversy that raged in German intellectual circles after F. H. Jacobi (17431819) accused the deep deceased G. E.Lessing (17291781) of Spinozism. With these works Kant secured international fame and came to dominate German philosophy in the late 1780s. But in 1790 he announced that the Critique of the Power of Judgment brought his critical enterprise to an end (5170). By then K. L. Reinhold (17581823), whose Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (1786) popularized Kants moral and religious ideas, had been installed (in 1787) in a chair devoted to Kantian philosophy at Jena, which was more centrally located than Konigsberg and rapidly developing into the focal point of the next phase in German intellectual history.Reinhold soon began to criticize and move remote from Kants views. In 1794 his chair at Jena passed to J . G. Fichte, who had visited the master in Konigsberg and whose first book, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), was published anonymously and initially mistaken for a work by Kant himself. This catapulted Fichte to fame, but he too soon move away from Kant and developed an original position sort of at odds with Kants, which Kant finally repudiated publicly in 1799 (12370371). Yet while German philosophy moved on to assess and respond to Kants legacy, Kant himself continued publishing important works in the 1790s.Among these are Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), which drew a censure from the Prussian King when Kant published the book after its second essay was rejected by the censor The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), a arrangement of essays inspired by Kants troubles with the censor and dealing with the relationship between the philosophical and theological faculties of the university On the Common SayingThat May be Correct in Theory, But it is o f No Use in Practice (1793), Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), and the Doctrine of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kants main works in political philosophy the Doctrine of Virtue, the second part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), a catalogue of duties that Kant had been readying for more than thirty years and Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), based on Kants anthropology lectures.Several other compilations of Kants lecture notes from other courses were published later, but these were not prepared by Kant himself. Kant retired from teaching in 1796. For nearly two decades he had lived a highly disciplined life focused primarily on completing his philosophical system, which began to take definite shape in his mind only in middle age.After retiring he came to believe that there was a flutter in this system separating the metaphysical foundations of natural science from physics itself, and he set out to close this gap in a series of notes t hat postulate the existence of an ether or caloric matter. These notes, known as the Opus Postumum, remained unfinished and unpublished in Kants lifetime, and scholars disagree on their significance and relation to his earlier work. It is clear, however, that these late notes show unmistakable signs of Kants mental decline, which became tragically precipitous some 1800. Kant died February 12, 1804, just short of his eightieth birthday. 2. Kants project in the Critique of Pure Reason.The main topic of the Critique of Pure Reason is the possibility of metaphysics, understood in a specific way. Kant defines metaphysics in terms of the cognitions after which reason might strive independently of all experience, and his goal in the book is to reach a ratiocination about the possibility or impossibility of a metaphysics in general, and the determination of its sources, as well as its completion and boundaries, all, however, from principles (Axii. See also Bxiv and 4255257). Thus metaphy sics for Kant concerns a priori knowledge, or knowledge whose justification does not depend on experience and he associates a priori knowledge with reason.The project of the Critique is to examine whether, how, and to what extent human reason is capable of a priori knowledge. 2. 1 The crisis of the Enlightenment To understand the project of the Critique better, let us consider the historical and intellectual context in which it was written. 5 Kant wrote the Critique toward the end of the Enlightenment, which was then in a state of crisis. Hindsight enables us to see that the 1780s was a transitional decade in which the ethnic balance shifted decisively away from the Enlightenment toward Romanticism, but of course Kant did not have the benefit of such hindsight. The Enlightenment was a reaction to the rise and successes of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The undischarged achievement of Newton in particular engendered widespread confidence and optimism abou t the power of human reason to control nature and to improve human life. One effect of this new confidence in reason was that handed-down authorities were increasingly questioned. For why should we need political or religious authorities to tell us how to live or what to believe, if each of us has the capacity to figure these things out for ourselves?Kant expresses this Enlightenment commission to the sovereignty of reason in the Critique Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its theology and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it.But in this way they crusade a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination (Axi). Enlightenment is about thinking for oneself rather than letting others think for you, according to What is Enlightenment? (835).In this essay, Kant also expr esses the Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress. A few independent thinkers will gradually inspire a broader cultural movement, which ultimately will locomote to greater freedom of action and governmental reform. A culture of enlightenment is almost inevitable if only there is freedom to make public use of ones reason in all matters (836).The task is that to some it waited unclear whether progress would in fact ensue if reason enjoyed full sovereignty over traditional authorities or whether unaided reasoning would instead lead straight to materialism, fatalism, atheism, skepticism (Bxxxiv), or even libertinism and authoritarianism (8146). The Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason was tied to the expectation that it would not lead to any of these consequences but instead would support certain key beliefs that tradition had always sanctioned. Crucially, these included belief in God, the soul, freedom, and the compatibility of science with morality and religion.Although a few intellectuals rejected some or all of these beliefs, the general spirit of the Enlightenment was not so radical. The Enlightenment was about replacing traditional authorities with the federal agency of individual human reason, but it was not about overturning traditional moral and religious beliefs. Yet the original inspiration for the Enlightenment was the new physics, which was mechanistic. If nature is in all governed by mechanistic, causal laws, then it may seem that there is no room for freedom, a soul, or anything but matter in motion. This threatened the traditional view that morality requires freedom. We must be free in order to choose what is right over what is wrong, because otherwise we cannot be held responsible.It also threatened the traditional religious belief in a soul that can survive death or be resurrected in an afterlife. So modern science, the pride of the Enlightenment, the source of its optimism about the powers of human reason, thre atened to undermine traditional moral and religious beliefs that free rational thought was expected to support. This was the main intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment. The Critique of Pure Reason is Kants response to this crisis. Its main topic is metaphysics because, for Kant, metaphysics is the domain of reason it is the inventory of all we possess through pure reason, ordered systematically (Axx) and the authority of reason was in question.Kants main goal is to show that a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion. In other words, free rational inquiry adequately supports all of these essential human interests and shows them to be mutually consistent. So reason deserves the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment. 2. 2 Kants Copernican revolution in philosophy To see how Kant attempts to achieve this goal in the Critique, it helps to reflect on his grounds for rejecting the Platonism of the Inaugural Dissertation. In a way the Inaugural Dissertation also tries to leave office Newtonian science with traditional morality and religion, but its scheme is different from that of the Critique.According to the Inaugural Dissertation, Newtonian science is true of the sensible world, to which sensibility gives us access and the understanding grasps principles of divine and moral perfection in a distinct intelligible world, which are paradigms for measuring everything in the sensible world. So on this view our knowledge of the intelligible world is a priori because it does not depend on sensibility, and this a priori knowledge furnishes principles for judging the sensible world because in some way the sensible world itself sets to or imitates the intelligible world. Soon after writing the Inaugural Dissertation, however, Kant expressed doubts about this view.As he pardoned in a February 21, 1772 letter to his friend and former student, Marcus Herz In my dissertation I was content to explain the nature of intellectual representations in a merely negative way, namely, to state that they were not modifications of the soul brought about by the object. However, I silently passed over the further question of how a representation that refers to an object without being in any way stirred by it can be possible. By what means are these intellectual representations stipulation to us, if not by the way in which they affect us? And if such intellectual representations depend on our inner activity, whence comes the agreement that they are supposed to have with objects objects that are nevertheless not perhaps produced thereby?As to how my understanding may form for itself concepts of things completely a priori, with which concepts the things must necessarily agree, and as to how my understanding may formulate real principles concerning the possibility of such concepts, with which pri nciples experience must be in postulate agreement and which nevertheless are independent of experience this question, of how the faculty of understanding achieves this conformity with the things themselves, is still left field in a state of obscurity. (10130131)Here Kant entertains doubts about how a priori knowledge of an intelligible world would be possible. The position of the Inaugural Dissertation is that the intelligible world is independent of the human understanding and of the sensible world, both of which (in different ways) conform to the intelligible world.But, leaving aside questions about what it means for the sensible world to conform to an intelligible world, how is it possible for the human understanding to conform to or grasp an intelligible world? If the intelligible world is independent of our understanding, then it seems that we could grasp it only if we are passively affected by it in some way. But for Kant sensibility is our passive or receptive capacity to b e affected by objects that are independent of us (2392, A51/B75). So the only way we could grasp an intelligible world that is independent of us is through sensibility, which means that our knowledge of it could not be a priori. The pure understanding alone could at best enable us to form representations of an intelligible world.But since these intellectual representations would wholly depend on our inner activity, as Kant says to Herz, we have no good reason to believe that they conform to an independent intelligible world. Such a priori intellectual representations could well be figments of the brain that do not correspond to anything independent of the human mind. In any case, it is completely mysterious how there might come to be a correspondence between purely intellectual representations and an independent intelligible world. Kants strategy in the Critique is similar to that of the Inaugural Dissertation in that both works attempt to reconcile modern science with traditional morality and religion by relegating them to distinct sensible and intelligible worlds, respectively.But the Critique gives a far more modest and yet revolutionary account of a priori knowledge. As Kants letter to Herz suggests, the main problem with his view in the Inaugural Dissertation is that it tries to explain the possibility of a priori knowledge about a world that is entirely independent of the human mind. This turned out to be a dead end, and Kant never again maintained that we can have a priori knowledge about an intelligible world precisely because such a world would be entirely independent of us. However, Kants revolutionary position in the Critique is that we can have a priori knowledge about the general structure of the sensible world because it is not entirely independent of the human mind.The sensible world, or the world of appearances, is constructed by the human mind from a combination of sensory matter that we pay back passively and a priori forms that are supplie d by our cognitive faculties. We can have a priori knowledge only about aspects of the sensible world that reflect the a priori forms supplied by our cognitive faculties. In Kants words, we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them (Bxviii). So according to the Critique, a priori knowledge is possible only if and to the extent that the sensible world itself depends on the way the human mind structures its experience.Kant characterizes this new constructivist view of experience in the Critique through an analogy with the revolution wrought by Copernicus in astronomy Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects but all attempts to control out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which wou ld agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he do the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their ob ject and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also con.