I reconstruct the preliminary arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which provide the criteria of on which Kant’s central arguments will turn. Kant characterizes intuition as (i) object-giving, (ii) immediate, (iii) affection-dependent representation containing (iv) a matter of sensation that can be distinguished from (v) an a priori form. I explain Kant’s curiously teleological claim that all thought “aims at” intuition in terms of his “baseline conception” of intuition as providing nonintellectual grounds of truth: This is what it means for intuition to be object-giving. I then argue that Kant’s theory of discursive marks entails that object-giving representations must be immediate. Further, the intuition paired with a discursive intellect must be receptive (i.e. affection dependent). These claims can be justified via pure apperception. What cannot be is Kant’s characterization of intuition as sensible. But I show that Kant’s form/matter distinction and his subsequent arguments require only the receptivity of intuition, not its sensory embodiment. The chief doctrines of the Aesthetic can be justified via pure apperception, as part of a top-down approach to intuition.

I develop an account of Kant’s technical notion of “exposition” and, in particular, “metaphysical” exposition. This involves explaining his distinction between concepts that are “made” and those that are “given,” as well as his murky notion of “original acquisition.” I then turn to Kant’s account of exposition as conceptual analysis. I argue that apperceptive reflection is the principal vehicle of conceptual analysis and, thus, the nervus probandi of Kant’s arguments in the Expositions. This yields a general picture of the Expositions as advancing the critical project of reason’s self-knowledge. An attractive consequence of my account en passant is that the discussion of original acquisition provides a novel and tidy explanation of the much-discussed distinction between formal intuition and the form of intuition in terms of the tripartite Aristotelian distinction between first potentiality, second potentiality (first actuality), and second actuality.

This paper addresses the generality problem arising for the use of spatial figures in geometry by emphasizing Kant’s notion of the schema of a geometrical concept (in contrast to an individual figure falling under that concept). It then relates this notion of schema to space as a form of intuition by connecting geometrical constructions (examples of Kantian schemata) with the possible perspectives of the perceiving subject within space as the form of outer intuition. And it uses this relationship between geometrical schemata and what I thus call "perceptual space" (the form of outer intuition) to develop a new interpretation of the relationship between the understanding and sensibility in section 26 of the Transcendental Deduction. The result is a reading of Kant on space and geometry that shows how geometrical, perceptual, and physical space are necessarily related to one another.