Categories
The twelve pure concepts of the understanding (e.g. cause, substance, unity) by which the understanding structures all experience — prior to any experience.
Categories, for Kant, are fundamental concepts the understanding possesses independently of all experience. He arranges them in four groups of three — quantity, quality, relation and modality — and derives them systematically from the table of judgments, the survey of all possible forms of judging.
That these concepts really hold for all objects of experience is established by the “transcendental deduction” — one of the most famous and most difficult arguments of the “Critique of Pure Reason”: without categories such as cause and substance there would be no ordered experience, only a swarm of impressions.
Where it appears
- Aesthetics — The purposiveness of nature
- Knowledge — The Copernican revolution
- Critique of Pure Reason — Structure & core ideas
- FAQ
- Home — Kant in five minutes
Source: Wikipedia: Categories