Lara Scaglia

Kant´s Notion of a Transcendental Schema


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      Theophrastus gives Aristotle’s view a more scientific rather than metaphysical bent. In his work on sensibility (On Sense Perception - Περὶ αἰσθήσεων -) he compares Democritus and Plato’s theories. He states that while both Plato and Democritus separate sensibility and understanding, Democritus does not ascribe an objective status to perception, since it merely depends on the subject’s sensible modifications. In contrast, objectivity is provided by a principle (archē), which consists in indivisible elements that cannot be grasped through the senses, namely the atoms, which are objects of the understanding and have quantitative and measurable features such as their size, dimension and shape or ‘schema’ (Thphr. Sens. 65–66).21

      Later on, Philo of Alexandria uses the notion to describe the physical external shape of things (Philo. Alex, De op. m. § 120), while Proclus attributes to ‘schema’ a new original, epistemological sense, which is close to that of Kant: it does not refer to external features of things or linguistic or logical structures, but rather to representations, which mediate between things and concepts, sensibility and intellectual activity (Proclus, In Euc., 51, 21, 94, 25). There is no evidence to support a direct, historical lineage to Kant, although the similarity of the two perspectives is impressive.

      Another example of the synonymy and interchangeability of ‘schema’ and ‘figura’ is found in Augustin’s allusion to modes of speech, in his explanation of the term ‘enigma’:

      However, there are some controversies on the translation of the term ‘schema’ into ‘figure’ or ‘form’: the first being the Aristotelian figure of the syllogism, whilst the second concerns the logical form.

      For example, taking Boethius (475/477 – 524/526), who translates Aristotle’s Prior Analytics as well as the Topics: he develops in his main works, namely De syllogismo categorico, Introductio ad syllogismos categoricos, De hypotheticis syllogismis (Boethius 1882–1891) a theory on the hypothetical syllogism and modifies the figures (schemata) of syllogism by changing the translation of the copula used by Aristotle (Boethius uses the verb: “to be”, instead of the more literal “to belong”).←27 | 28→

      Later on, William of Ockham and John Buridan also used the noun ‘schema’ to indicate the figure of the syllogism. More specifically, the former, in his Summa logicae (Ockham 1974) proposes to substitute Aristotle’s method to prove syllogisms’ figures (ekthesis) through the use of a particular syllogism (called expository), in which the middle term (which determines the form or schema of the syllogism) is the subject of both premises. While the latter develops in his Summulae de Dialectica (Buridan 1487) and in Consequentiae (Buridan 1493) a theory of syllogism, considered as a kind of formal consequence, distinguished in figures (or ‘schemata’), the conclusion of which might be direct or indirect (i.e. the minor term is predicated of the major).

      This logical connotation of the noun endures in the Modern Ages also. However, it comes to possess also a new, epistemological sense, which later on develops and flourishes especially in the works of Kant.

      Differing from the Middle Ages, the notion of schema in the Modern Ages returns to hold a variety of non-logical connotations: figurative (Wolff), rhetorical (Sturmius, Diderot, D’Alembert), biological (Ploucquet), physical (Bacon) and epistemic (Thomasius, Darjes, Tetens).

      A more philosophical connotation is attributed to the term by Francis Bacon, who uses the notions ‘schematismus’ and ‘meta-schematismus’ (Bacon 1620, I, pp. 45–5) to indicate the structure of matter and its changes:

      In contrast with metaphysics, which looks for forms and essences beyond experience, he aims at elaborating a new method in philosophy, intended as an actual science, which works through the help of observations and experiments and aims to discover objective properties of nature. This