The legitimating fact in the transcendental deduction of the categories: on Dieter Henrich’s reading of Kant.

Abstract

This article reconstructs the principal moments of Dieter Henrich’s work on Immanuel Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Henrich seeks to clarify and regain the fundaments of Kant’s theory of knowledge – from which his followers, according to him, have distanced themselves – based on the analysis of the “transcendental deduction of the categories”. Firstly, Henrich investigates the proof structure of deduction, comparing the first and the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason. Secondly, he investigates, in the Kantian argument, the relationship between the identity principle of self-consciousness and objectivity. Finally, extending the comparison to Critique of Practical Reason, Henrich elucidates the program and methodology in deduction, showing that the idea of a legitimating fact, borrowed from the juridical notion of a deduction, becomes the fundamental element. We analyse the problems raised by the conception of a philosophical argument based on fundamental “facts”.