Kant on Representation and Objectivity

After summarizing in chapter two the basic goals of the deduction as well as clarifying a number of key Kantian teachings, such as the two-faculty model of cognition (34f.), the status of empirical concepts (38f.), the notion of necessary universal validity (54), and things in themselves (75 f.), Dickerson turns in his third chapter to a detailed analysis of § 16. In spite of repeatedly claiming that an understanding of the historical context is important, Dickerson does not even mention any of the other possible sources such as Christian Wolff or members of his school (G. F. Meier, A. G. Baumgarten) or other authors whom Kant had studied (C. A. Crusius, J. B. Merian, or J. N. Tetens), who had all used the term 'apperception'.12 Of course, regardless of the exact provenance of Kant's 'apperception', nobody before him had treated it as the condition of synthetic judgements a priori or as the highest point of transcendental philosophy, so a historical study of possible sources will necessarily be only of limited value to an understanding of Kant's usage of the term. Dickerson defends Kant's argumentation by proposing that its goals are more modest than is often assumed in the literature. [...]he suggests that the second paragraph of § 17 merely emphasises that our cognition involves both spontaneity and receptivity, rather than arguing for some conclusion such as "representations relate to an object if and only if there is a unity of consciousness", a conclusion which does not follow from the premises (152-158). [...]as Kant explains in § 26, the deduction only grounds a 'natura formaliter spedata' but not also the special laws of nature so that Kant can only claim that As and Bs necessarily have causes.