The Conclusion locates Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant among contemporary Anglophone interpretations. The author shows that Heidegger’s interpretation is legible within the broader landscape of Anglophone Kant scholarship by charting its position on Kant’s metaphysics, discursivity, conceptualism, idealism, and historicism. It is concluded that Heidegger offers us a live option for interpreting Kant.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

Chapter 4 contends with the Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment and the discursivity of the understanding. It argues that a discursive understanding must think of the empirical world as ordered by an ideal system of universal concepts, which takes the form of a complete hierarchical taxonomy: from the most general empirical concepts to ever more specific concepts. It argues further that the assumption of a comprehensive hierarchy of concepts determining the sensibly given is Kant’s way of talking about the objective order of nature. Only the complete but unattainable determination of the sensibly given by a complete system of concepts can ground the claims to objectivity made in determinative judgments. Kant ultimately thinks of such a system and its concepts as not merely descriptive but as causally informative and thus explanatory as well. It is a transcendental condition of empirical experience and knowledge, which follows from the fact that we are discursive creatures in pursuit of objective knowledge. An important consequence is that empirical knowledge claims are always revisable and indeed defeasible. A further very important argument shows that the part-to-whole or mechanistic form of physical explanation is also grounded in the discursivity of our understanding.

Chapter 2 discusses Kant’s account of the ‘logical use of reason,’ which consists in drawing ‘mediate inferences’ (e.g., syllogisms). It is guided by the ‘Logical Maxim,’ which requires us to search for the conditions of or conditioned cognitions until we arrive at unconditioned cognitions. Its aim is to transform our manifold cognitions about nature (both empirical and a priori) into a complete system of scientific knowledge and thus to achieve the ‘unity of reason.’ The chapter also places Kant’s conception of systematic cognition in the context of the Wolffian school and explains what it means for cognitions to be conditioned or unconditioned. Finally, the Logical Maxim is defended as a plausible expression of our rational striving for systematicity and completeness of knowledge.