I. Transcendental Illusion (p. 297)

• Dialectic in general is a logic of illusion.
  • Not the same as probability which is part of the analytic logic.
  • Not the same as appearance, illusion is not in the object but in the udgment.
• Transcendental illusion exerts its influence on principles that are not intended for use in experience.
  • Not optical illusion.
  • Not logical illusion, i.e. misusing a logical rule.
  • Transcendental dialectic carries us beyond the empirical use of the categories.
• Immanent Principles: application is confined within the limits of possible experience.
• Transcendent Principles: those whose application carries us beyond those limits.
  • Not Transcendental misemployment of the categories.
  • Transcendent is not the same as Transcendental.
• Transcendental illusion is mistaking the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves.
  • We cannot prevent the illusions.
  • They will not disappear after we identify them.

A) Reason in General
• Reason is the faculty of principles, it secures the unity of the rules of understanding under principles.
  • Understanding is the faculty of rules.
• Knowledge from principles is that in which I apprehend the particular in the universal through concepts.
• Principles are synthetic modes of knowledge derived from concepts, understanding can never supply them.
• Reason applies itself to understanding, never to experience or objects.
B) The Logical Employment of Reason (p. 303)
• Immediate Inference: (inference of the understanding) when the judgment is already contained in the earlier judgment so that it may be obtained without the mediation of a third representation.
• Inference of the Reason: When another judgment is required, in addition to the primary proposition, to reach the conclusion.
• In every syllogism, I:
  • First, think a rule through the understanding (major premiss).
  • Second, subsume something known under the condition of the rule by means of judgment (minor premiss).
  • Finally, I determine through the predicate of the rule, and so a priori, through reason (conclusion).
• The three types of syllogism are Categorical, Hypothetical and Disjunctive.
C) The Pure Employment of Reason (p. 305)
• The question is: Does pure reason contain a priori synthetic principles and rules?
• Reason in the syllogism does not concern itself with intuitions but with concepts and judgments.
• Even if pure reason does concern itself with objects, it has no immediate relation to them, but only to the understanding.
  • Therefore, the unity of reason is not the unity of experience.
• Reason, in its logical employment, seeks to discover the universal condition of its judgment.
• The principle peculiar to reason in general is: To find, for the conditioned knowledge, the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion.
  • Meaning: each major premiss, although a universal rule, should be subjected to the same requirement of reason, namely to find the universal condition of it.
  • This principle can become a principle of pure reason when we assume that the series of conditioned knowledge can be traced back to an unconditioned.
    • Such a principle of pure reason is synthetic.
    • The principles arising from this principle of pure reason will be transcendent in relation to appearances.
    • Whether this principle has any objective validity will be the subject of the Transcendental Dialectic.