Kant´s Notion of a Transcendental Schema. Lara Scaglia

I find that it is interesting and important to focus on the history of philosophical terms and problems that are related to non-philosophical disciplines. Philosophers often use terms that come from several fields of human experience and knowledge and provide them with new significance in accordance to the question they aim at solving, thus creating their own technical language. Kant gives to ‘schema’ (a term used before him in rhetoric, logic, and psychology) a particular meaning and uses it to solve an epistemological question whose origins are related to the philosophy of mathematics. But the problem of schematism is also a great example of the difficulties and importance of discriminating between fields of knowledge. Several authors before and especially after Kant have regarded schematism as a psychological rather than a philosophical topic; even Kant himself sometimes uses a psychological terminology in his discussions. Given this, what is the relation between philosophy and psychology? If they share topics (for instance, the problem of cognition), are ←16 | 17→they both necessary and separated disciplines? Why? Or should we revise our customary disciplinary distinction?

      To investigate these questions, I intend to evaluate the function of the schematism chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason by means of: 1) an historical study of the uses of the term ‘schema’ before and after Kant, in order to show how it becomes a philosophically defined term, and how Kant arrives at his own problem of schematism; 2) achieving a critical definition of the notion of schema (as it is presented in the chapter of the Critique) in order to decide whether the introduction of schemata is a necessary step in Kant’s transcendental project, or a redundant addition to the pure forms of the sensibility and of the understanding; 3) the understanding of the legacy of Kant’s schemata focusing on the relation (if there is any) between transcendental schemata and related psychological and philosophical notions developed by his successors.

Method

      During the development of this research, it became clear to me that the customary distinction between historical and critical methods is an oversimplification. Both are needed and mutually linked to one another. On the one hand, I carried out an historical inquiry on the philosophical uses of the concept of schema before and after Kant. Then, before considering the uses of the term within the Critique of Pure Reason, I researched whether Kant himself used the term in his pre-critical works. It is present only in two texts: the Nova Dilucidatio (1755) and the dissertation De mundi intelligibilis atque sensibilis forma et principiis (1770). Moreover, although Kant does not yet use the terminology of schematism, in Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral (1764), relevant aspects of the problem of applying pure concepts to experience are already present. Finally, I focused on the legacy of Kant’s notion, not only by considering the main receptions among philosophers, but also stressing how three influential twentieth-century psychologists - Jean Piaget, Frederic Bartlett and Lawrence Barsalou - took up Kant’s terminology while refashioning the function of schemata to their own agendas. I have decided to enter this territory, since the concept of a schema has become a lively discussed topic within cognitive psychology, often with reference to Kant and equally often with misunderstandings of his own notion. It is important to rectify this reception of Kant, and it should help to clarify the relations between philosophy and psychology in this area.

      In my historical analysis of the idea of schema, I have considered the aims of the texts inquired in order to understand meaning and function of ‘schema’ ←17 | 18→in each of them. For instance, in the passages of Kant’s works investigated here, the purposes of the author differ and because of this, ‘schema’ assumes different functions: from its metaphysical significance in the Nova Dilucidatio over its description as “outline” (AA II, p. 393) in the Dissertation of 1770 up to the manifold definitions present in the schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. From this perspective, these diversifications, although present in the texts of the same author, do not generate incoherence and any contradiction, because Kant’s aims in each of the passages considered are different. Besides, I show how he develops schematism from problems in the definition of mathematics (namely the problem of the application of pure concepts to experience) and how he comes to identify the solution to the problem of such an application with the notion of schema, that was used in texts of his predecessors and contemporaries such as Joachim Georg Darjes, Johann Nicolas Tetens and Christian Thomasius. In this inquiry concerning the origins of Kant’s schematism, I do not see a conflict or an alternative between historical and critical methods in philosophy, but a necessary and advantageous mutual engagement. Moreover, the notion of schema is a perfect example of how a notion of the past can be used to confront current problems concerning the notions of imaging and frames, the relation between cognitive functions and perception, or the tasks and limits of philosophy and psychology. The legitimacy of this historical and critical research is provided by the fact that there are theoretical similarities between the questions Kant investigates by referring to the notion of schema and by the references that later modern authors often make to Kant as their main interlocutor.

State of the art

      Although Kant scholarship is notoriously plentiful, there are very few monographs exclusively dedicated to the problem of schematism (Califano 1968, Camartin 1971, Kang 1985, Gasperoni 2016, Fisher 2017). This topic still requires further analysis, and I will therefore hope to give a distinct contribution by contextualising Kant’s views, thus helping to better explain their meaning and their impact.

      To inquire the different uses of ‘schema’ in the history of philosophy I have built on to the entries on ‘schema’, written by Werner Stegmaier and Theo Herrmann in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (1992) and to the original texts of the authors here considered. Moreover, I have largely profited of the Kant-Lexikon, edited in 2015 by Marcus Willaschek, Jürgen Stolzenberg, Georg Mohr and Stefano Bacin, that provides the largest and most penetrating lexical reference on Kant. Classical commentaries on the schematism chapter ←18 | 19→are those of Smith 1918, Beck 1965a, Klemme 2004, and Paton 1936. Moreover, one of the most important contributions to the debate concerning the importance of the schematism chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason is given by the views presented in Cassirer 1922–57 and Cohen 1871: the former believes that it is useless, while the latter stresses the fundamental role of schemata. Another important contribution is given by de Vleeschauwer 1937, who declares that the doctrine of schematism can be explained only by referring to Kant’s distinction between two kinds of reason and experience, i.e. the difference between synthesis speciosa and intellectual synthesis presented in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Other fundamental studies are those of: Holzhey 1970, who distinguishes several notions of objects in the Critique, and Scaravelli 1968 and Barone 1958 with their contributions to understanding the relation between general and transcendental logic. Apart from these, six critical studies of the twentieth century will be considered in closer detail, namely: Zschocke 1907, Curtius 1914, Walsh 1957–58, Dahlstrom 1984, Guyer 2006 and Allison 2004. These interpreters have been chosen because they differ in tasks and approaches and are therefore perfect examples for showing how the schematism chapter, given its obscurities and difficulties, has generated a long-standing and lively debate, one that has not found a conclusive point yet. Moreover, I have decided to investigate and evaluate the direct and indirect references to Kant’s doctrine of schematism in his successors: from the earliest receptions of Maimon, Herder, Humboldt, through idealists and post-Kantians (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart, Beneke, Schleiermacher, and Fries) to authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Dilthey, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer, Whitehead, Horkheimer, and Wittgenstein). Finally, I shall focus on the psychological receptions of the notion of schema. One of the distinctive aims of this dissertation is to provide an interpretation of schematism in consideration of the relation between transcendental philosophy and psychology. The background of this interest is the following. Famously, Strawson 1966 combines his analytical standpoint and his interest in the transcendental philosophy. According to Kitcher 1990, Strawson’s analytical account disregards the core of Kant’s inquiry, namely its “dark side”, which concerns his ubiquitous talk of cognitive faculties – such as sensibility, the understanding, imagination, reason, memory and so on - and which can offer important