Status Updates From Essay on Transcendental Phi...

"Since these forms [categories] serve only to connect objects and not to produce them" It's not that simple

"the extent of space can never be greater than the extent of things that fill it" i don't know, i would try to argue that it not only is but has to be

Space is not a schema for difference, because we can conceive a deaf-blind person conceiving differences merely through the power of memory. Rhythms. Schema is after all supposed to be something that is shared by all those that it is a schema of. Space, then, has something that is not simply tied to difference ie. difference is not what is essential about it

but this is the chicken and egg problem again

"the form of sensibility is the schema of this difference" oh no so it collapses on this view again...He tries to argue for this with the fact that difference is a more universal concept than space/time, because all difference must appear within them. But you could rather say: since all difference must appear in intuition and not vice versa, it is conditioned by intuition rather than the other way around

...although his explanation of conditions of appearance still seems a bit weird, I can at least integrate some of this now to my understanding of Kant in order to enrich it, rather than just provide fodder for many inevitable debates and the like

So, here we come to the main part of this book, after what seemed like a bit poorly structured beginning: Maimon posits forms of perceptions in between conditions of appearance and concepts of understanding. Forms of perceptions are unity and difference. This is what makes the manifold "a manifold", pre-categorially, without influence of categories of relation

Chps 4-5 seem to move to just summarizing CPR stuff, kind of discontinuously when preceded by the strong criticisms of previous chapters. Weirdly structured text.

But related to this, a quote from Gardner's Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason: "just as the understanding works on the manifold of sensibility, so reason, which has the understanding as its immediate object, works on the understanding's manifold of judgements" So because there is understanding which is impossible without reason, how could the manifold of understanding(love it) be independent from it?

"in order to produce a straight line as object, the understanding thinks the rule that it should be the shortest between two points" I mean, there's no separate category for precisely that. this could be combined with the criticism that categories can be applied on top of categories, given Kant's motivations of saving science and whatnot (as if the definition could be derived somehow from mere quantity, quality etc.

Trying to criticize Kant's analysis of the proposition "straight line is the shortest between two points" on the grounds of its not being synthetic and proof is something about plurality of lines, which is...missing the point, by quite a bit, and in a similar way as in the section 1.

The criticisms are getting better if we ignore the initial hurdle, and are valid regardless of it...like the heterogeneity of understanding and intuition as another version of the unjustifiable soul-body split.

A great point about pure concepts of understanding used "illegitimately" in an a posteriori sense, like causal explanation, which Kant tries to save: to what extent does Kant end up with a situation where the introduction of a priori conditions involves a sneaky justification of a posteriori explanations, that is most science, slapped on top of the a priori conditions.

On a more positive note, the bit about space and time being negations of each other was really cool. It gives one some material to conceive of a connection between the two based on that relation.

tl;dr right from the outset it seems Kant goes much farther in his thought than this later work (of which I have/had(ish) great expectations) so it seems kind of deflating. Even Kant and Fichte both appreciated this book though, iirc, so of course I must read on

...so unity of the manifold actually becomes a prerequisite for intuition and "consciousness first arises when the imagination takes together SEVERAL homogeneous sensible representations, orders THEM according to its forms (succession in time and space)" But how would it perceive this type of multiplicity so as to order it based on something else? It seems that this requires conceiving in-itself spatiality

But anyway, let's not even be cautious, Kant is still clearly right compared to this guy, because Maimon is clearly forced to resort to the idea of a point of extension to conceive of his differential from it of quality, degree, whatever as a basis for pre-intuition things-in-themselves, with spatiality therefore smuggled in to make unity of manifold to appear not only pre-categorially but pre-intuitively

I feel like many latch onto the "chicken and egg" aspect you can coax from Kant if you are pedantic enough, without noticing that the most they're doing is begging the question even of the foundations of their own philosophies. Fichte didn't seem to fall at least so completely in this category, however, it was just...weird in other ways

This is very hard and my brain hurts but the flashes of grokking that I get are pretty damn cool. Eg: synthetic a priori propositions are actually analytic propositions except we're too finite to recognize that. An infinite being would, but we only catch glimpses of the analyticity of judgements on account of our finitude. How cool is that? (OK yes my standards of cool are ... to be desired).