This thesis defends an interpretation of the argument that Immanuel Kant calls his Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. It is divided into four chapters. The subject of the first chapter is the aim of Kant's Deduction of the Categories. It is argued that what Kant has set out to find is an answer to the question how it is that the Categories are able to serve as representations of objects. This chapter also includes a detailed account of what Kant thinks is required for a concept to serve as a representation of an object. The subject of the second chapter is the strategy of Kant's Deduction of the Categories. It is argued that what Kant thinks he needs to do in order to deduce the Categories is to show that an object must conform to the Categories if we are to make a judgment about this object. The third chapter is concerned with the central claim of Kant's Deduction of the Categories, viz. the Principle of the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception. It is argued that this principle consists in the claim that if we are to make a judgment about an object then we must be able to achieve a special sort of consciousness - specifically, the consciousness of what Kant calls the necessary unity of synthesis. The fourth and final chapter of the thesis is concerned with Kant's justification for the Principle of the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception. It is argued that Kant's commitment to this principle is based on his recognition of a key fact about an act of judgment, viz. the fact that in making a judgment about an object, part of what we think is that our representations ought to be connected in a particular way.

This dissertation seeks to examine the essential nature of time--both the concept in physics, biology, and philosophy, and the phenomenon in life and culture--with the ultimate goal of deepening our understanding of the empirical manifestation of time in human mental experience. It thus engages with both philosophy and with empirical science, natural as well as humanistic, in the paradigms of history, social theory, fundamental (or philosophical) anthropology, as well as with human neuroscience. The central argument is that while time is not an empirical phenomenon in physics - time itself is not an absolute quality of matter - one can make a certain argument for the real existence of time in biology, and still a different argument for a unique, linear phenomenon of time that derives from the specific human, cultural, experience. To make these arguments the dissertation devotes attention to the analysis of both the concept of time and the empirical phenomenon to which it refers successively in physics, biology, philosophy and history/sociology. Arriving at the conclusion that the linear concept of time (the causally significant relationship between the past, present and future) reflects a phenomenon that is uniquely human and suggests the ways in which this experience is necessarily reflected in the brain. / 2022-02-26T00:00:00Z