The Aesthetic Use of the Logical Functions in Kant's Third Critique by Stephanie Adair

Author:Stephanie Adair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I.D Hierarchy

Categorical judgments exhibit a hierarchical relation between the sphere and its parts that is nowhere to be found in disjunctive judgments. In categorical judgments the representation of the thing “is considered as a part of the sphere of another.”681 Thus, the representation is subordinated to the sphere and “considered as contained under this, its higher concept.”682 Hence, the part of the sphere represented in the judgment is subordinated to the sphere.

In a disjunctive judgment, however, this is not the case. Through the complementa’s mutual exclusion, each of the parts is equal to the whole, and will be equated with the whole, if it is decided upon as the one that holds assertorically. Kant explains this in terms of the sphere of the concept, writing, “[w]hat is contained under the sphere of a concept is also contained under one of the parts of this sphere.”683 Although the sphere of the concept of the whole is equivalent with the sphere of the concept of each of the complementa, the latter are “not in any way parts of one another.”684 This is what is meant by referring to the complementa as the “divided concept.”685 Categorical judgments, thus, subordinate the parts to the whole concept, whereas disjunctive judgments coordinate “all the parts of its sphere.”686 We can represent this contrasting relation through the diagram in the figures below:

Fig. 1: A Parti Poodle is a dog. (Categorical Judgment) Fig. 2: “The world exists either through blind chance, or through inner necessity, or through an external cause.”687 (Kant’s example of a disjunctive judgment) Kant concludes, “Here [in a disjunctive judgment] I think many things through one concept, there [in a categorical judgment, I think] one thing through many concepts, e. g., the definitum through all the marks of coordination.”688

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