Critique of Pure Reason Essay Example for Free

Critique of nice origin EssayImmanuel Kant (17241804) is the substitution figure in modern school of thought. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for frequently of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical system, and continues to exercise a signifi sack upt shape today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, governmental school of thought, aesthetics, and other fields. The perfect idea of Kants sarcastic philosophy especi tout ensembley in his three Critiques the Critique of exquisite savvy (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) is kind autonomy.He argues that the gay understanding is the source of the general laws of personality that organise all our let and that valet race reason gives itself the object lesson law, which is our basis for belief in God, license, and immortality. Therefore, scientific experience, ethical motive, and religious belief at omic number 18 mutually consistent and assure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is similarly the final end of nature check to the teleological land deal of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical references of his philosophical system.1. Life and working Immanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, near the s show upheastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Today Konigsberg has been renamed Kaliningrad and is conk come in of Russia. But during Kants life history 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 thusly a major commercial center, an important military port, and a copulati unless if cosmopolitan university town.1 Kant was born into an crafter family of modest means. His father was a master harness maker, and his mother was the daughter of a harness maker, t hough she was better educated than most women of her social class. Kants family was never destitute, precisely his fathers trade was in decline during Kants early days and his pargonnts at times had to rely on extended family for financial support. Kants parents were Pietist and he attended a Pietist school, the Collegium Fridericianum, from ages ogdoad through with(predicate) cardinal.Pietism was an evangelical Lutheran movement that emphasized conversion, reliance on divine grace, the familiarity of religious emotions, and personal devotion involving regular Bible study, prayer, and introspection. Kant reacted strongly against the forced soul-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 ripen Kants emphasis on reason and autonomy, rather than emotion and waitence on either authority or grace, may in part reflect his youthful reaction ag ainst Pietism. But although the schoolgirlish 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 through their Pietism than through their artisan determine of hard work, honesty, cleanliness, and independence, which they taught him by example. 2 Kant attended college at the University of Konigsberg, known as the Albertina, where his early interest in classics was apace superseded by philosophy, which all showtime year students studied and which encompassed mathematics and physics as wellspring as logic, metaphysics, ethics, and natural law.Kants philosophy professors exposed him to the approach of Christian Wolff (16791750), whose critical synthesis of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz (16461716) was whence very(prenominal) influential in German universities. B ut Kant was alike exposed to a range of German and British critics of Wolff, and there were strong doses of Aristoteleanism and Pietism represented in the philosophy might as well. Kants deary thatched roofer was Martin Knutzen (17131751), a Pietist who was heavily influenced by cardinal 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 for the first time create work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747), which was a critical attempt to mediate a dispute in natural philosophy mingled with Leibnizians and Newtonians over the decorous measurement of force. aft(prenominal) college Kant spent six years as a private tutor to younker children outside Konigsberg. By this time both of his parents had died and Kants finances were non to date insure enough for him to surveil an academic career.He finally returned to Konigsberg in 1754 and began teachi ng at the Albertina the following year. For the following four decades Kant taught philosophy there, until his retirement from teaching in 1796 at the age of seventy-two. Kant had a burst of publishing activity in the years after he returned from working as a private tutor. In 1754 and 1755 he published three scientific works one of which, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), was a major book of account in which, among other things, he developed what later became known as the nebular hypothesis virtually the workation 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 excessively wrote two Latin orations the first, entitled Concise Outline of Some Reflections on Fire (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 subscri ber.The following year he published another Latin work, The Employment in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, of Which Sample I Contains the Physical Monadology (1756), in hopes of succeeding Knutzen as beau professor of logic and metaphysics, though Kant failed to secure this position. Both the New Elucidation, which was Kants first work concerned mainly with metaphysics, and the Physical Monadology further develop the position on the interaction of finite substances that he first sketch in Living Forces. Both works depart from Leibniz-Wolffian soak ups, 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 gigantic amount and to attract many students in order to earn a living. Kant held this position from 1755 to 1770, during which per iod he would lecture an average of twenty hours per week on logic, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as mathematics, physics, and physical geography.In his lectures Kant used textbooks by Wolffian authors such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (17141762) and Georg Friedrich Meier (17181777), only he followed them loosely and used them to structure his own reflections, which drew 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), whatever of whose texts were translated into German in the mid-1750s and from the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778), who published a trouble of works in the early 1760s.From early in his career Kant was a popular and successful lecturer. He also quickly developed a local reputation as a promising young adroit and cut a dashing figure in Konigsberg society. After several years of relative quiet, Kant unleashed a nother burst of publications in 17621764, including five philosophical works. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762) rehearses criticisms of Aristotelian logic that were developed by other German philosophers.The Only Possible Argument in confine of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (17623) is a major book in which Kant drew on his earlier work in Universal History and New Elucidation to develop an original list 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 analyse entitled Inquiry Concerning the raciness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality to a prize competition by the Prussian Royal Academy, though Kants submission as wellk second prize to Moses Mendelssohns winning essay (and was published with it in 1764). Kants Prize Essay, as it is known, departs much signif i canfultly from Leibniz-Wolffian views than his earlier 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 reckon 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 comfortably supplies the material content of our moral obligations, which cannot be demonstrated in a purely ingenious itinerary from the formal principle of perfection alone (2299).4 These themes reappear in the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of detrimental Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763), whose main thesis, however, is that the real opposition of conflicting forces, as in causal coituss, 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 pass of the internal forces that mot ivate one to act, rather than of the external (physical) actions or their consequences.Finally, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the rarified (1764) deals mainly with alleged differences in the tastes of men and women and of people from different cultures. After it was published, Kant filled his own interleaved double of this book with (often unrelated) handwritten remarks, many of which reflect the deep influence of Rousseau on his thinking some 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 original.Like other German philosophers at the time, Kants early works are in general concerned with using insights from British empiricist authors to reform or broaden the German rationalist tradition without radically undermining its foundations. While some of his early works tend to emphasize rationalist ideas, others defy a more(prenominal) empiricist emphasis. During this time Kant was striving to work out an self-directed position, but in the first place the 1770s his views remained fluid. In 1766 Kant published his first work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, which later became a central topic of his mature philosophy.Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, which he wrote soon after publishing a minuscule 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 population 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 unbiased soul that survives finish, and he concludes that philosophical knowledge of either is im accomplishable because human reason is limited to do it.The skeptical tone of Dreams is tempered, however, by Kants suggestion th at moral faith nevertheless supports belief in an immaterial and immortal soul, even if it is not possible to attain metaphysical knowledge in this domain (2373). In 1770, at the age of forty-six, Kant was appointed to the electric chair 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 income. Kant was turned downhearted 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 gradually extended his repertoire of lectures to imply 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 novel position, Kant also wrote one more Latin dissertation Concerning the Form and Princi ples of the commonsense and Intelligible World (1770), which is known as the initiative oration.The Inaugural 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 understanding (intelligence), where the Leibniz-Wolffians regarded understanding (intellect) as the only fundamental power.Kant therefore rejects the rationalist view that sensibility is only a confused species of intellectual cognition, and he replaces this with his own view that sensibility is searching from understanding and brings to perception its own subjective forms of space and time a view that developed out of Kants earlier criticism of Leibnizs relational 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 worlds sensibility gives us access to the sensible world, while understanding enables us to chain of mountains a distinct apprehensible world. These two worlds are related in that what the understanding grasps in the intelligible world is the paradigm of NOUMENAL PERFECTION, which is a common measure for all other things in so farthermost as they are realities. Considered theoretically, this intelligible 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 based 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 a nd 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 running toward his mature position in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), according to which the understanding (like sensibility) supplies forms that structure our experience of the sensible 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 marked the beginning of another burst of activity that produced Kants most important and permit 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 Science (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 resolving t o the Question What is judgment? (1784), which broaches some of the key ideas of his later political essays and What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in cerebration? (1786), Kants intervention in the pantheism controversy that raged in German intellectual circles after F. H. Jacobi (17431819) accused the recently dead person 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 letter 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 away from Kants v iews. 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 disclosure (1792), was published anonymously and initially mistaken for a work by Kant himself. This catapulted Fichte to fame, but he too soon moved away from Kant and developed an original position quite at odds with Kants, which Kant finally repudiated publicly in 1799 (12370371). Yet while German philosophy moved on to assess and suffice 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 collection of essays inspired by Kants troubles with the censor and traffic with the relationship between the philosophical and theological faculties of the university On the Common SayingT hat May be shed light on in Theory, But it is of 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 planning for more than thirty years and Anthropology From a Pragmatic aspire 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 develop 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 gap 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 that postulate the existence of an ether or thermic consider. 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 approximately 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 powerfulness strive breakawayly of all experience, and his close in the book is to reach a decision about the possibility or impossibility of a metaphysics in general, and the determination of its sources, as well as its fulfilment and boundaries, all, however, from pri nciples (Axii. See also Bxiv and 4255257). Thus metaphysics 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 wisdom 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 evidence of crisis. Hindsight enables us to call for that the 1780s was a transitional decade in which the cultural equilibrize 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 spectacular movement of Newton in particular engendered widespread confidence and optimism about the power of human reason to experience nature and to improve human life. One effect of this new confidence in reason was that handed-downistic 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 commitment to the sovereignty of reason in the Critique Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything essential submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it.But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to support 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 expresses the Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of come out. A few independent thinkers will gradually inspire a broader cultural movement, which ultimately will lead to greater license 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 problem is that to some it seemed unclear whether progress would in fact ensue if reason enjoyed full sovereignty over traditional authorities or whether unaided reasoning would kinda 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 authority 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 entirely governed by mechanistic, causal laws, then it may seem that there is no mode for freedom, a soul, or anything but matter in motion. This exist 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, th e source of its optimism about the powers of human reason, threatened 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 reconcile Newtonian science with traditional morality and religion, but its strategy 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 alines to or imitates the intelligible world. Soon after writing the Inaugural Dissertation, however, Kant uttered do ubts about this view.As he explained 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 affected by it can be possible. By what means are these intellectual representations given 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 possibly 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 conce rning the possibility of such concepts, with which principles experience must be in exact 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 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 out 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 be 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 entirely depend on our inner activity, as Kant says to Herz, we have no earnest 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 attemp t to reconcile modern science with traditional morality and religion by subject 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 receive pa ssively and a priori forms that are supplied 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 uranology Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects but all attempts to discern 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 obje cts must conform to our cognition, which would 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 object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also con.