The Types of Universals and the Forms of Judgment

The forms of judgment are widely recognized to be central to thinking and to knowing objectivity. Seldom, however, have the necessity, interrelation, and completeness of these forms been investigated. Although Kant can be credited for having brought them to center stage, he is notorious for failing to account for their diversity or for that of the categories he finds rooted in each form. As Kant himself would have to admit, assurances that judgment is found in certain shapes, relating terms through certain concepts, will not suffice for any universal claims for either thinking or objective knowledge. At best, what is culled from tradition or psychological observation can support corrigible descriptive claims of contingent local application.

To be conceived as such, independent of any conditional empirical content, judgment must not be considered in relation to any specific concepts that happen to be predicated of a subject. Instead, judgment must be examined in respect to the concept in general. Moreover, judgment per se must not predicate the concept in regard to any specific, contingently given subject. Rather, judgment, considered as such, must predicate the concept to the subject as such. To be logically rather than empirically determined, the subject can have no further content than the particular or the individual. These contents are themselves intrinsic to the concept. This is because the concept, logically speaking, is the universal, and the universal constitutively involves both the particular and the individual. Without differentiating itself through the particular, the universal cannot have its encompassing identity, whereas by being at one with itself in the particular, the universal engenders the individual, that which owes its differentiation to itself, enabling the particular to be distinguishable from other particulars, and the universal to be a one over many.1 Accordingly, judgment will constitutively relate these necessary elements of the concept -of universality- to one another. In determining the subject by the predicate to which it gets connected, judgment will accordingly determine the concept by its own elements, as related ...

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