6 - The System of Transcendental Ideas

Summary

A central aspect of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic is his claim that there are concepts – the transcendental ideas – that necessarily arise from rational reflection. According to Kant, these ideas of reason, like the categories of the understanding, form an a priori system. In Chapter 6, we first look at Kant’s conception of transcendental ideas and survey the system they form. Next, it is argued that Kant does not attempt to derive the transcendental ideas in questionable ways from the forms of rational inferences or the possible relations between subject, object, and representation (even though the text suggests this), but rather considers them, much more plausibly, as concepts we arrive at through rational inferences about specific (psychological, cosmological, and theological) subject matters. The central philosophical point here is that concepts can be the result of (what Kant calls) ‘necessary inferences of reason.’ A first instance of this is Kant’s derivation of the concept of the unconditioned; the chapter then turns to the three classes of transcendental ideas (psychological, cosmological, theological).