Kantian Categories: Concepts and examples of the categories into which Immanuel Kant’s thought is divided. Pure concepts and a priori categories. Here’s what they are
To understand the meaning that Immanuel Kant gave to the concept of category , we must first understand what the philosopher meant by concept .
In the Analytic of Concepts , Kant argues that intuitions are affections (i.e., something passive), while concepts are functions , i.e., active operations capable of ordering and unifying different representations under a “common representation”.
The concepts, in turn, can be:
- Empirical , that is, built with materials derived from experience
- Pure (identified with the categories), that is, contained a priori in the intellect.
IMMANUEL KANT: CATEGORIES
For Kant there are 12 categories , even if the philosopher derives this number from the twelve types of judgment typical of Aristotelian formal logic, forgetting that his criticism was born to study the synthetic and constructive capacities of thought, and that instead the 12 types of judgments of traditional logic were derived from language.
Despite this, Kant believes that he has identified, through the study of categories, the functioning modalities of the human intellect which, operating on the contents of sensitive intuition, establishes constant relations and relationships.
KANT’S 12 CATEGORIES
The twelve categories are divided into four groups:
- amount;
- quality;
- relation;
- mode.
Each group contains three categories. The quantity categories are:
- multiplicity,
- unit,
- totality.
The quality ones are:
- reality,
- denial,
- limitation;
those of relationship are:
- substantiality,
- causality,
- reciprocal action;
those of modality are:
- possibility – impossibility,
- existence – non-existence,
- need.
This rigid Kantian classification is artificial, but the central intuition that animates the whole discourse counts: the intellectual categories are the constant rhythm of thought that orders and constructs the phenomenal world and provide us with a natural physical knowledge of a scientific type. In this way Kant achieves the overcoming of Hume .
Those relations that Hume considered to be the effect of habit , which therefore remained unstable and subjective, and which therefore put the possibility of scientific knowledge into crisis, in Kant are relations necessarily constructed a priori by the intellect , and which thus established a stable framework of reconstructed and reproducible phenomena.
In this way, Kant believes he has saved science, because he gives it a consistency of universality and necessity , even if he is aware that the system of relations that is typical of science is not a reality in itself, autonomous with respect to thought, as dogmatic rationalism wanted, but rather a weaving operated by thought itself.
Consequently, the natural world that we know and experience is not configured as an absolute reality independent of us, but a reality that appears to us as it is because our thought arranges it in these terms, according to the needs of the intellect: reality is therefore appearance , that is, phenomenon, and science is the science of phenomena .
