The Transcendental Deduction of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a tough nut to crack. The power of its philosophical sustenance is matched only by the stubbornness of its hull. In her book, Alison Laywine aims to shed new light on this text by arguing for the thesis that it involves, at its core, an appropriation and reinterpretation of Kant’s own early cosmology. To build her case, Laywine appeals to a range of pre-Critical texts, from the Nova Dilucidatio through the metaphysics lectures of the 1770s, but her main focus is a collection of notes from roughly 1775 known as the Duisburg Nachlaß. It is from this vantage point that one is to recognize the key role that the notion of the world plays in the historical development of Kant’s conception of the understanding that culminates in the Transcendental Deduction.

Laywine cites Karl Ameriks as a significant guidepost for her work insofar as she takes herself ‘to have confirmed in detail Ameriks’ thought that traditional metaphysics was not merely the topic of a service course Kant was required to give’ but one that remained ‘very much alive in his thinking in the 1780s’ (p. 15). Just a word of caution here about this point: the book does not address any of the Critical Kant’s metaphysical commitments regarding things in themselves or the possibility of our thoughts about them. Rather Laywine focuses her attention on the role that Kant’s conception of a world plays in the realm of the cognizable.

The structure of the book is as follows. In chapter 1, Laywine presents a reading of the Duisburg Nachlaß. In chapters 2–3, she introduces the aim of the transcendental deduction and offers readings of §§15–19 of its argument. Chapter 4 focuses on §26 and chapter 5 on the problem of self-affection in §24. Finally, the Conclusion addresses some outstanding issues regarding Kant’s principles of possible experience. In what follows I will focus on the valuable work of chapters 1, 4 and 5, where the thesis of the book is largely executed. I will then say a few things about the content of chapters 2 and 3.

In chapter 1, Laywine presents her two big ideas. The first is a reading of the Duisburg Nachlaß in which she argues that Kant’s new epistemological concerns of the 1770s can best be understood against the background of his earlier cosmological commitments. Just as the Kant of the Nova Dilucidatio appeals to God as the single, simple ground of explanation for the law-governed, real interaction of substances in a world whole, so the Kant of the Duisburg Nachlaß appeals to the thinking subject as the single, simple ground of explanation for the objective connections among appearances in an ‘epistemological whole’. Through intellectual intuition of itself, the thinking subject is to avail itself of rules that it then uses to bring appearances under objective relations. Although Kant will soon abandon aspects of his view, including the possibility of intellectual intuition of the self, the underlying philosophical project remains and, with it, an interpretative key to the Critique: when Kant asks about the necessary conditions of experience, he is ultimately asking about the conditions of a unified whole of appearances governed by universal laws.

Laywine’s second big idea supported by a close reading of the Duisburg Nachlaß is that Kant uses a proof structure from classical geometry as a model for thinking about how the subject converts appearances into this whole of experience. It consists in three steps: (1) a statement of that which is to be proved; (2) the presentation of a special, but representative, case through the construction of images; and (3) an enunciation in the first person that restates the general proposition in terms of the special case. Laywine introduces the Greek term ekthesis – a concept that will become central to the book – to refer to the second step. The initial motivation for this interpretative hypothesis is Kant’s talk in the Duisburg Nachlaß and other contemporaneous texts of the ‘exposition’ of appearances as an analogue of a priori construction through which the thinking subject brings appearances to an objective whole. ‘Exposition’ is the Latinate equivalent of ekthesis and can be intelligibly rendered in English as the ‘setting out’ of appearances. So Kant’s thought is supposed to be that, just as geometry requires that we first trace out images in order to make intelligible the relations among figures, so too experience requires that one run through and set out the appearances in such a way as to make intelligible the relations among objects. In each case the items to be understood (images, appearances) are made intelligible in virtue of laws of universality that they represent in terms of special cases. The second promise of chapter 1, then, is that this activity of ekthesis will shed light on Kant’s conception of experience as presented in the Transcendental Deduction, even if the language of ‘exposition’ is almost entirely abandoned by the Critique (with the possible exception at A247/B303).

It is in chapters 4 and 5 that Laywine’s interpretative hypotheses bear fruit. Laywine begins chapter 4 with her reading of the two-step approach to the transcendental deduction: in the first step, Kant is interested in the conditions that make possible experience in some minimal sense of individual ‘items of empirical knowledge that can each take the form of a judgment’, whereas in the second step Kant gives experience ‘a new and richer characterization’: namely, that of ‘perceptions … connected with one another under laws’, or ‘nature’ (p. 212). This moving target raises an immediate question: does Kant shift to a richer conception of experience in the second step and then argue in some regressive way to its conditions? Or does Kant begin the second step with the thinner notion of experience (or something even thinner?) and advance in some kind of ‘progressive’ argument that guarantees the richer notion of experience? Laywine appears to endorse the latter reading insofar as she focuses throughout the book on radical sceptical worries (motivated by passages at A90/B123 and A111) as the proper target of the deduction. It is further confirmed by claims like: ‘we cannot entertain any thought unless we are able to think the objects of our thought as situated in the world’ (p. 14), and ‘the principle of nature in the formal sense is the necessary condition of all thinking’ (p. 222). But where these programmatic claims appear in her text, they are often supported more by tentative and independent philosophical speculations than by careful exegesis of Kant’s text, leading one to wonder how committed Laywine is to such a strong progressive reading. And in a footnote where an explicit meta-level discussion of Kant’s argumentative strategy can be found, Laywine expressly rejects the progressive reading in the secondary literature according to which Kant secures claims about universal laws of nature ‘by appealing only to the “I think”’ (p. 259, n. 35). One can, moreover, find programmatic claims in the book that suggest a more modest reading – e.g. ‘it will take the second step of the B-Deduction to show that the synthetic unity of apperception is the ground of all thinking just because it is the ultimate ground of nature in the formal sense’ (p. 225). It is unclear to what extent Laywine’s book achieves an interpretation of Kant’s deduction as aimed at guaranteeing, in some progressive anti-sceptical argument, a nature of universal laws that govern all possible appearances. What is clearly achieved, and compatible with a more modest reading of Kant’s aim, is an innovative analysis of his conception of those capacities and activities of the mind that make construction of a single, universal nature possible.

In particular, Laywine’s originality is to be found in her insightful reconstruction of Kant’s account of perception in §26 of the Deduction as involving a map-making capacity of the mind, an idea inspired by Kant’s own example of the map-making of a city in the Metaphysik L₁. It is argued first that perception is a species of image-formation akin to ekthesis – namely, a temporal going-through and setting-out of the manifold elements of the relevant appearances – and second that all empirical image-making requires a priori image-making, i.e. pure intuitions of space and time that themselves are the result of ekthesis. By appealing to a footnote in the Inaugural Dissertation, Laywine then reconstructs a suppressed step in the argument of §26 that would explain how we can get from isolated perceptions to a single universal experience. We produce an image of the whole phenomenal world by taking a timeline and adding perpendicular lines to represent all states obtaining at given moments; we then represent these perpendicular lines in turn as two- or three-dimensional grids in order to bring in spatial relations. This map of the phenomenal world does not, of course, give us a likeness of nature – indeed if it resembles anything it would be something ‘like a toothed comb’ – but rather helps ‘make nature possible by giving us a way … to orient ourselves and the things of interest to us relative to each other, and to us, in the larger empirical context in which we encounter them’ (p. 245).

But this is only the first step. What the deduction needs to do now is to show how the categories, and not just pure intuitions, are required for perception – or, in Laywine’s terms, ‘how we get from the principles of the cartography of the sensible world to … universal laws of nature’ (p. 259). The key move is summed up as follows: ‘universal laws of community applicable to all possible appearances are required to make our map-making possible, because map-making is just a technique for graphically recording external relations and external relations depend on laws of community’ (p. 259). Laywine motivates this ‘now obvious’ interpretative claim by appealing briefly to Kant’s cosmological commitments in the Nova Dilucidatio; she then proceeds to the issue of why the categories are necessary conditions for the universal laws of nature. Here the reader would benefit from more detail: are there no philosophical reasons why the Critical Kant holds that laws of community among appearances are required for map-making? And even if the answer to this were somehow obvious, one might still wonder why map-making requires laws of community to be applicable to all possible appearances. Laywine closes the chapter by returning to the three-step proof strategy of geometry as a model for understanding the relation between the cartography of the world and the universal laws that govern it, and by suggesting that the details of this relation are in fact worked out in the Analogies:

Perhaps Laywine will unpack the details of this idea in future work.

In chapter 5 Laywine extends the ideas of cosmological cartography and ekthesis to her reading of the paradox of inner sense in §24 of the Deduction. To understand Kant’s problem, Laywine looks first to pre-Critical texts. In the anthropology lectures of the early 1770s we find an instructive account of self-affection as the activity of a single, simple mind in discourse with itself, a model that can survive up through the Duisburg Nachlaß, where inner sense and apperception are not yet clearly distinguished as wholly passive and active capacities, respectively. But once they appear in the Critique as ‘really distinct’ parts of the mind (p. 272), it becomes unclear how such a self is possible. As I understand Laywine’s view, Kant’s answer to the problem is not to offer some kind of explanatory account of how really distinct, pure capacities of the mind can interact such that a single self-affecting self can emerge, and where it turns out that ‘I just am my apperception’ in some ‘abstract sense’ (p. 278). Rather, Kant’s solution is to begin with the only self we can know – the empirical self – and to give an account of the conditions that make it possible. Here again, ekthesis, which appears at B154 in the example of a line drawn in thought, will play the key role: I chart the places, as well as the times, of the events that have happened to me in the past, and that I anticipate will happen to me in the future; I draw up a cartography of the self. The resulting map is just a piece of our larger map of the whole sensible world and will require a similar account of understanding, sensibility and imagination to explain it. But what is it about an autobiographical map that captures the first-personal perspective that makes this image about me? Laywine’s ultimate answer is that it is the determinate synthesis of pure apperception and its capacity for self-ascription. This, I take it, is not intended to be a new thought. Rather, the point of the account is that the apparent paradox can be resolved once we recognize that we never encounter a pure or free-floating ‘I think’ from which we then must construct a self-affecting self. The ‘I think’ is always already embedded in the world and, as such, concretely determined. In short, how do I affect myself? By drawing my autobiography.

Finally, a word about chapters 2 and 3, to which the brevity of this review cannot do justice. The commentary presented there on sections §§15–19 of the Deduction seems largely independent of the guiding interpretative ideas introduced in chapter 1 (Kant’s early cosmology, ekthesis), and the contact it does make with the Duisburg Nachlaß (two short sections that total six pages) is restricted to pointing out differences between the two texts. Concepts such as ‘manifold’, ‘combination’, ‘synthesis’, ‘apperception’, ‘unity’, ‘object’ and ‘logical form’ are of course key notions for any reading of §§26 and 24, but it is often not clear how the things Laywine says about them in chapters 2 and 3 contribute in a specific way to the main thesis of the book. Moreover, it is not always easy to see how the commentary – taken on its own terms – offers new and productive insights into Kant’s text. Part of the difficulty may be that a number of Laywine’s readings make rather limited contact with secondary literature when it comes to her main interpretative claims. Nonetheless there are plenty of acute observations of Kant’s text to be found and insights to gain.

In sum, there is much to recommend engagement with Laywine’s valuable book. It certainly deserves the attention of scholars of the Transcendental Deduction. And whatever its shortcomings, its main argument does offer an illuminating new point of entry into an old, obstinate vessel.