Las actividades de la vida diaria para la población con discapacidad visual

Based on the argument for Corollary2one might pose the following objection: If Kant conditions his arguments on the definition of a human being, doesn’t he, as a consequence, deprive his transcendental argument from its purity by smuggling empirical cognition into the argument? After all, the answer to the question ‘what is man?’ belongs to the field of anthropology [Kan92a, Jäsche Logic - 9:25]. Moreover, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant explicitly states that the above elaboration of the fundamental principle of practical reason does not belong to transcendental philosophy at all, since it builds on the empirical concepts of, for example, pleasure and desire:

Hence, although the supreme principles of morality and the fundamental concepts of it are a priori cognitions, they still do not belong in tran- scendental philosophy since the concepts of pleasure and displeasure, of desires and inclinations, of choice, etc., which are all of empirical origin, must there be presupposed. [Kan00, A14/B28 - A15/B29]

At first sight the above objection seems to be a serious problem for Kant’s transcendental endeavour. Empirical concepts, such as the concepts mentioned in the above quote, have been used throughout the whole analysis. Kant seems to have anticipated this problem and clarified it in a footnote in the introduction of the second Critique (5:9). He says the following:

However, the definition there could admittedly be so framed that the feeling of pleasure would ground the determination of the faculty of de- sire [...], and thus the supreme principle of practical philosophy would necessarily turn out to be empirical. [Kan96a, footnote to 5:9]

One can question the purity of Kant’s undertaking by positing the question whether pleasure, arising from empirical cognition, grounds the faculty of de- sire. (An affirmative answer means that Kant’s usage of the concept of the faculty of desire would make the results of Theorems1and2, and consequently FLoP itself, empirical.) Kant solves this problem by stating that the question in total must be refuted. He provides the following definitions of the concept’s associated with the faculty of desire:

Lifeis the faculty of a being to act in accordance with laws of the faculty

of desire. The faculty of desireis a being’s faculty to be by means of

its representations the cause of the reality of the objects of these repres-

entations. Pleasureis the representation of the agreement of an object

or of an action [...] with the faculty of the causality of a representation [...] with respect to the determination of the powers of the subject to action in order to produce the object. [Kan96a, footnote to 5:9]

The above definitions, the ones that Kant uses in the Analytic of the second Critique, are not based on whether pleasure grounds the determination of

the faculty of desire or not; they are solely based on their functions and the relations between these concepts. The concepts and relations used in these definitions are not of an empirical nature, but merely constructed from con- cepts of the pure understanding (e.g. consider ‘in accordance with laws’, ‘being the cause of the reality of an object’ and ‘by means of representation’). Con- sequently, Kant’s concept of a human being does not have an empirical origin: The concept is merely based on the human being’s faculties which are defined in terms of pure concepts of the understanding. Kant therefore concludes the following:

For the purposes of this Critique [the second Critique] I have no further need of concepts borrowed from psychology; [...] for it [the definition of

the faculty of desire] iscomposed only of marks belonging to the

pure understanding, i.e., categories, which contain nothing empirical. [Kan96a, 5:10 - bold emphasis my own]

Benton argues that only through this explicit pure definition of the faculty of desire, Kant is allowed to carry out a Critique of practical reason without the risk of transforming his argument to an argument of empirical psychology [Ben77, p.24-25]. Hence, only with respect to the definitions provided in the footnote of the introduction to the second Critique Kant is justified in using the concepts of the faculty of desire in the analytical part of this Critique. On the basis of the above elaboration it can be concluded that Kant’s argument thus far is free of any empirical cognition.

Proposition 5. The concept of the faculty of desire and its associated con-

cepts, as used in Kant’s practical transcendental argument, are defined on the basis of a priori concepts and are independent of any empirical cognition.

Proof. By definition Definitions3.8,3.10,3.11, and 3.12.

With respect to the first quote of this section, it seems that Kant has changed his mind regarding the possibility of transcendental arguments in a critique of practical reason. The footnote in the introduction to the second Critique sup- ports this conjecture. In the first Critique Kant still expresses the conviction that a transcendental undertaking in practical philosophy would be impossible because of the empirical nature of the faculty of desire. In the second Critique Kant explicitly states that one might object to any transcendental endeavour in this Critique for the same reasons that he endorsed in his first Critique. Only now Kant advocates the refutation of this objection: That is, Kant explicitly shows that the faculty of desire is not based on any empirical cognition.