David Leon Thomas Sommer (UCL) - 2017-18 Students
david.sommer.15@ucl.ac.uk

Transcendental logic and the investigation of linguistic competence

My thesis concerns recent attempts to formulate successor notions to Kant’s pure categories of the understanding by taking the task of transcendental logic to consist in the investigation of broadly linguistic capacities required for the ability to produce and understand judgment. While these attempts differ in the respective capacity they take to characterise judgment as such, I will argue that they share central claims concerning the sortal restriction of indexicals and the modal restriction of sortals. Further, I will argue that these attempts can be unified through an examination of the different stages of synthesis depicted in Kant’s transcendental analytic despite their heavily reconstructive and anachronistic nature.