In the First Analogy of Experience in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues, on the ground that it is needed for a united time, that everything in the world is (permanent) substance or a determination thereof. In this paper, I advance what I call a representational reading of this text, and I explain how it addresses two concerns. The first is that Kant’s argument should have no leverage to establish (permanent) substance in experience, since pure intuition already represents a ‘united’ time. The second is that even if Kant can establish the existence of (permanent) substance, he cannot prove that this substance is the substratum for everything else.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to make incompatible claims regarding the unitary natures of what he takes to be our a priori representations of space and time. I argue that these representations are unitary independently of all synthesis and explain how this avoids problems encountered by other positions regarding the Transcendental Deduction and its relation to the Transcendental Aesthetic in that work. Central is the claim that these representations (1) contain, when characterized as intuitions and considered as prior to any affections of sensibility, only an infinitude of merely possible finite spatial and temporal representations, and (2) are representations that are merely transcendental grounds for the possibilities for receiving or generating finite representations in sensibility that are determined (immediately, in the case of reception) by means of syntheses that accord with the categories.