Abstract

My goal in this paper is to develop our understanding of the role the imagination plays in Kant’s Critical account of geometry, and I do so by attending to how the imagination factors into the method of reasoning Kant assigns the geometer in the First Critique. Such an approach is not unto itself novel. Recent commentators, such as Friedman (1992) and Young (1992), have taken a careful look at the constructions of the productive imagination in pure intuition and highlighted the importance of the imagination’s activity for securing the universality of geometry knowledge. Specifically, as their respective examinations bring to light, it is only with due attention to the imagination that we can make sense of how a ..