Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a slow reading, a careful study (Session 25)

For overall group description, see the first event page. . .

https://www.meetup.com/The-Toronto-Philosophy-Meetup/events/277446352/

. . . then if you decide to take the red pill, come back to this page and RSVP to the next event.

NEXT EPISODE. . . We will start the second book of the Transcendental Dialectic, "The Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason," continue through the First and Second Paralogisms, and stop before the Third Paralogism. Read pages 409 through 422, which comprise paragraphs A338-A361. No B paragraphs because, yes, Guyer has once again separated our LP into an A side and a B side.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

6. TRANSCENDENTAL IDEA. What's the difference between an idea in general and a transcendental idea, channeling A312/p395.
7. PARALOGISM: Can anyone explain the paralogism of psychology?
8. PARALOGISM. In the paralogism of substantiality, page 415, what is the relationship between "absolute subject" and "substance"?
9. PARALOGISM. What is the difference between a logical paralogism and a dialectical paralogism? For that matter, what is the difference between logical and transcendental dialectic?
10. DIALECTICAL INFERENCE. Kant begins with "It can be said that the object of a merely transcendental idea is something of which we have no concept, even though the idea is generated in an entirely necessary way by reason according to its original laws. For in fact no concept of the understanding is possible for an object that is to be adequate to the demand of reason, i.e., an object such as can be shown and made intuitive in a possible experience." Does this mean that reason is a bad thing?
11. TRANSCENDENTAL IDEA. The section on the "transcendental idea" begins with the distinction between the form of judgments and the concepts of understanding (B378/p399). After our last meeting, Louis, Scott, and I stuck around to discuss this distinction and reached some rough consensus, but I'm not sure everyone in the group would agree on it. What do you guys think is the difference between the judgments in Kant's table of judgments (A70/B95/p206) and the categories in Kant's table of categories (B106/p212)?
12. IDEAS IN GENERAL. B369/p395: "Coining new words is a presumption to legislate in language that rarely succeeds. . ."What do you think Kant means by this, and do you agree with him?
13. CONCEPTS OF PURE REASON. So are "soul" and "God" examples of concepts of pure reason?
14. IDEAS IN GENERAL. A315/B370/p395: "Ideas for him [Plato] are archetypes for things themselves, and not, like the categories, merely the key to possible experience." While not "merely" the key to experience, Kant implies that they could nevertheless serve such a minor role in addition to its major role. If so, how would these particular keys to experience differ from the categories?
15. THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEA. If I'm going backward in our wedding, I justify this because contest going backwards, "The form of judgments (transformed into a concept of the synthesis of intuition) brought forth categories that direct all use of the understanding in experience." [A321/B378/p399] so how exactly does the table of judgments "bring forth" the table of categories?
16. THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEA. A322/p399: "The function of reason in its inferences consisted in the universality of cognition according to concepts, and the syllogism is itself a judgment determined a priori in the whole domain of its condition." Kant then gives the example "Caius is mortal." The condition of mortality is an experiential concept, but we try to place this under some idea we call "human," and once we have that idea, we can proceed syllogistically a priori, untethered and transcending experience until we arrive at the absolute unconditioned that makes our conditioned experience possible. At least, that's how I read this passage. How do you understand it?
17. SYSTEM OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS. From p405, opening to "System of Transcendental Ideas": "Now all pure concepts have to do generally with the synthetic unity of representations, but concepts of pure reason (transcendental ideas) have to do with the unconditional synthetic unity of all conditions in general." Syllogisms aren't analytic? They are another kind of synthetic a priori?
18. THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEA. The Transcendental Dialectic concerns I think"? Why do we even refer to this statement as a "judgment"? And why does it inevitably lead to paralogical illusion?