Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between the various tasks carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason by analyzing Kant’s multifaceted use of the term ‘transcendental.’ Challenging the received view, it maintains that Kant’s seemingly divergent accounts of the subject hinge on his conception of transcendental philosophy proper and transcendental critique as first-order and second-order branches of transcendental cognition, respectively. Drawing on a brief account of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of the term ‘transcendental,’ the chapter seeks to show that Wolffian ontology and transcendental philosophy proper have more in common than is widely assumed: both disciplines can be said to provide a comprehensive account of the cognitive elements presupposed in any cognition of objects. On this account, the novelty of the Critique consists primarily in the second-order investigation into metaphysics that Kant calls transcendental critique. The chapter concludes by examining Kant’s criticism of the way his predecessors and contemporaries understood the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘transcendental philosophy.’

Chapter 6 seeks to establish that Kant’s account of the schematism of the pure understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason yields the same result as the transcendental deduction, but does so by approaching the question concerning the legitimate use of categories from the angle of time qua pure form of intuition. On my reading, Kant conceives of transcendental schemata and categories as different instances of the a priori rules that determine how the mind can unify a manifold at all. Since transcendental schemata present these rules as ways of unifying successive representations, they can be said to constitute the sensible condition of any a priori cognition of objects. I take Kant to argue that Wolffian metaphysics ought to use categories independently of this condition in order to establish itself as a purely intellectual discipline and, hence, that a priori judgments about the soul or God do not amount to cognitions of objects.