Abstract

In this paper, I focus on Kant’s doctrine of figurative synthesis. Figurative synthesis is the result of the activity of productive transcendental imagination. This is the chief problem of the so-called “second proof step” in Kant’s deduction of the categories according to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The pure original synthetic apperception forms in the inner and outer sense - i. e. in time and space - by self-affection structures of order that make it possible to cognize empirical objects. The order of space and time through figurative syntheses must be distinguished on the one hand from space and time as forms of intuition and on the other hand from the order of the manifold given in space and time. This clarifies the differences and relations between the constitutive noetic faculties of our knowledge apparatus.