THE SCHEMATISM

In this chapter, we focus on clarifying the nature of the problem that Kant sets out to solve in the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. This problem is the apparent impossibility of the pure concepts of the understanding having any use in subsuming under them objects that are given to us in our sensibility. What makes any such use seem impossible is, Kant tells us, the fact that these concepts are “entirely unhomogenous” with sensible intuition and thus are concepts that “can never be encountered in any intuition.” Previous attempts to clarify the nature of this problem have, we suggest, been hampered by the failure to get into sufficiently clear focus just how Kant conceives of the subsumption of an object under a concept. Attending carefully to his conception of such subsumption, and of how schemata make this subsumption possible, leads to a new reading of what Kant takes the problem to be. It also points the way to a new reading of how, in identifying transcendental time determinations as what correspond to the pure concepts of the understanding as their schemata, Kant provides what he contends is the only possible solution to this problem.