According to Kant’s lectures on logic, the formation of empirical concepts consists in the logical acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction. This paper defends the tenability of Kant’s account by solving two prominent difficulties identified by commentators. Firstly, I justify Kant’s chronological presentation of the three acts by clarifying two meanings of ‘comparison’ in his writings: while comparison-1 refers to apprehension in relation to apperception and precedes reflection, comparison-2 refers to a twofold operation comprising both comparison-1 and reflection, such that (...) its completion presupposes reflection. Secondly, to unravel an alleged ‘circularity’ in Kant’s account, I propose multiple interactions between comparison-1, which can be entirely arbitrary, and reflection, which examines the compared representations according to the imagination’s free agreement with the understanding, namely, a lawfulness without law. By means of such interactions, we experiment back and forth and lawfully generate an empirical concept without relying on conceptual guidance. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente artículo es ofrecer una interpretación de la doctrina del esquematismo de los conceptos empíricos y matemáticos presentada por Kant en su Crítica de la razón pura. Mostramos que los esquemas de los conceptos empíricos y matemáticos son procedimientos de síntesis gobernados por reglas conceptuales. Aunque no consideramos que esta doctrina kantiana carece de problemas, nuestro trabajo muestra que: 1) esos esquemas pueden distinguirse rigurosamente de sus correspondientes conceptos; 2) esos esquemas no son entidades superfluas. Estas conclusiones (...) se alcanzan mostrando que el contenido de un concepto determina la unidad de elementos sensibles que tiene que ser efectuada por un esquema en tanto procedimiento de síntesis. (shrink)