1

Introduction
Mathematics and the World of Experience

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continu-
ally open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to
comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is written. It is
written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible
to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a
dark labyrinth. . ..
—Galileo, Il Saggiatore, 16231

1.1 Kant and the Theory of Magnitudes

My aim in writing this book is to transform our current understanding of
Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, and in doing so, our understanding of
Kant’s account of the world of experience. Mathematics and the world are
more intimately intertwined in Kant’s philosophy than many have appreci-
ated. I will argue that in Kant’s account, mathematics is a science of
magnitudes, and the world of experience is a world of magnitudes. That is,
Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, pure as well as applied, is grounded in a
theory of magnitudes; at the same time, all objects of experience are and all
their real properties have magnitudes, so that the world we experience is a
world of magnitudes. The world is fundamentally mathematical in character,
and in taking magnitudes as its object of study, pure mathematics is about the
world. This is particularly true of geometry – the science of continuous spatial
magnitudes – which in Kant’s time still enjoyed a certain pride of place in
thinking about mathematics and in an understanding of the mathematical
character of the world.
This reorientation in Kant’s account of mathematics and his account of
experience has important consequences for our understanding of both math-
ematical and theoretical cognition. The role of intuition in both is a major

1
Translated in Popkin (1966, p. 65).

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theme of this book. According to Kant, a magnitude is a homogeneous

manifold in intuition. I will argue that in Kant’s view representing magnitudes
as magnitudes at all depends on intuition, because intuition allows us
to represent a homogeneous manifold. The fact that intuition allows us to
represent a homogeneous manifold has not been appreciated, yet it has
important implications for Kant’s claim that mathematical cognition and all
human cognition depend on sensible intuition. Moreover, I will argue that the
singularity of intuition is best understood as a mode of representing singularly,
one that is compatible with representing a homogeneous manifold in intuition.
Another closely related theme is that the role of intuition in Kant’s account
of mathematical cognition makes both our mathematical cognition and our
cognition of the mathematical features of experience more concrete than we
are apt to think today. To shift for the nonce to our contemporary parlance of
particulars, the role of intuition allows us to represent relatively concrete
particular magnitudes in space and time. By concrete, I mean that intuition
allows us to represent spatial and temporal particulars; by relatively concrete,
I here mean that the role of intuition in representing the mathematical features
of those particulars does not include the representation of causal relations, a
common feature attributed to concreta in our contemporary metaphysical
theorizing about them.2 The fact that intuition represents singularly is what
allows us to represent objects in concreto, and hence to represent particular
objects. Both pure mathematical cognition and our representation of objects of
experience rests on the singular representation of concrete continuous and
discrete homogeneous manifolds in intuition.
Kant’s account, however, is both complex and nuanced. First, Kant allows
for multiple roles for intuition in mathematical cognition, not just the repre-
sentation of concrete homogeneous manifolds. For example, intuition plays an
important role in allowing us to represent succession, which is required for
arithmetical cognition. Second, mathematical cognition does not merely rest
on the intuitive representation of particular concrete magnitudes; it also
essentially depends on concepts, in particular, the categories of quantity, as
well as rules for the representation of magnitudes, that is, schemata. Third,
Kant’s primary notion of magnitude is concrete, but he also makes room for
a more abstract notion of magnitude. The contrast between concrete and
more abstract representations of magnitude correspond to a distinction Kant
draws between two sorts of magnitude, quanta and quantitas. Furthermore,
this distinction is tied to Kant’s obscure and complicated understanding
of number.

2
This is a provisional characterization of “relative concreteness.” I will examine Kant’s
notion of concreteness in more depth in Chapter 5.

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A full account of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics would require sorting

out all the nuances and complexities of Kant’s theory of magnitudes and
bringing them to bear on what he says about geometry, arithmetic, algebra,
and analysis. I cannot hope to do all of that between the covers of one book.
Instead, this work will focus on the foundations of Kant’s theory of magni-
tudes and its relation to both Kant’s account of mathematical cognition and
our cognition of objects of experience. I plan to follow with another book that
will delve more deeply into the implications of the theory of magnitudes in
Kant’s account of geometrical, arithmetic, and algebraic cognition, as well as in
the foundations of analysis. The present book, I hope, will speak to those
readers interested more broadly in the foundations of Kant’s theoretical
philosophy, with an eye to his philosophy of mathematics and mathematical
cognition and its implications for Kant’s account of experience.
There are, however, a few features of the foundations of Kant’s theory of
magnitudes that cannot be fully and satisfactorily addressed until the details of
his account of mathematical cognition have been explained. Those include
aspects of the distinction between two notions of magnitude, quanta and
quantitas, and their relation to number. I cannot give a complete account of
number in this book, but I devote several sections to the distinction between
quanta and quantitas, and discuss Kant’s understanding of number and its
relation to the Greek mathematical tradition.3 We will see that in Euclid and
the Euclidean tradition, the understanding of continuous magnitude is entan-
gled with that of number in several ways. Those entanglements are also found
in Kant, but unraveling them requires an in-depth focus on Kant’s arithmetic.
There are therefore a few claims about quanta and quantitas and their relation
to number whose full defense depends on promissory notes to be redeemed in
the second book.
I will argue for an interpretation of the foundation of Kant’s theory of
magnitudes and its relation to his understanding of experience based both on a
close reading of the texts and on placing those texts in historical context. My
aim is to determine Kant’s views as accurately as I can without attempting to
evaluate Kant’s views from our contemporary perspective. It will be a sufficient
accomplishment to get Kant’s views right. I will press, however, to the limits of
Kant’s theorizing about magnitudes, that is, to the limits of how much he was
able to develop and articulate his views given the time he had to devote to the
topic. I will also move beyond what Kant explicitly says in order to reconstruct
the key assumptions underlying his theory and to determine his views with
regard to those assumptions.

3
For an argument that Kant’s conception of number includes both cardinal and ordinal
elements, see Sutherland (2017). Future work will more fully address the relationship of
Kant’s conception of number to quanta and quantitas and also explain Kant’s understand-
ing of irrational numbers.

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This work is meant to be generally accessible to philosophers interested in

Kant’s account of experience, and will not presuppose anything but a rudi-
mentary understanding of mathematics nor a familiarity with the history of
mathematics. From those steeped in philosophy of mathematics or its history,
I beg patience, and hope that there is ample material of interest to hold their
attention. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I say a bit more about
the themes mentioned above to orient the reader, before closing with an
overview of the book.

1.2 Mathematics Then and Now

Kant’s view of mathematics as a science of magnitudes was common in the
eighteenth century, but it is strikingly different from our contemporary way of
thinking. This is not the place to recount the history and philosophy of
mathematics from Kant to the present, but there are two ways in which
Kant’s views are different that are important to highlight. The first is that
mathematics has become a science of number rather than magnitudes. The
“arithmetization” of mathematics over the course of the nineteenth century
placed natural number firmly at the foundation of mathematics, encouraged a
more abstract understanding of number, and introduced a separation between
mathematics and the world. Pure mathematics is no longer about the world
insofar as it is constituted by magnitudes. Instead, natural numbers are used to
construct the rationals, the reals, and complex numbers, and once these
foundations are complete, the relation between mathematics and the world
can be taken up as an issue of applied mathematics. Further work at the end of
the nineteenth century on the foundations of arithmetic itself attempted to
provide a foundation of number in terms of notions more basic than natural
numbers and their arithmetic. These notions were supplied by logic and the
emerging theory of sets, both of which were thought of in abstract terms,
which reinforced a more abstract understanding of number. At the same time,
the development of axiomatics solidified the growing primacy of arithmetic
over geometry, as well as a separation of pure mathematics from the world to
which it was applied. “Pure” geometry came to be viewed as the study of the
consequences of various sets of axioms apart from whether those axioms
describe physical space. As a result of all these developments, pure mathemat-
ics shifted in the nineteenth century from being a science of magnitude to
being first and foremost a science of number.4
The fact that the arithmetization of mathematics led to a more abstract
understanding of mathematics and a separation between pure mathematics

4
According to Petri and Schappacher (2007), the view of mathematics as a science of
magnitudes was not extinguished until 1872.

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and the world is closely related to a further issue: the drive to emancipate
mathematics from intuition. The eighteenth century saw remarkable advances
in mathematics, especially in analysis, which included what we now call
calculus. Nevertheless, when it came to foundational questions, mathemat-
icians and philosophers still reverted to thinking of mathematics as a science
of magnitudes, and many of those mathematicians and philosophers particu-
larly concerned with foundations thought that intuition, in particular, geomet-
rical representations, played an important role in securing the meaning and
certainty of the most basic concepts and propositions of mathematics. Kant
was among them.5
Kant radically departs from previous philosophers in elevating the status
and role of intuition in all human cognition. Previous philosophers distin-
guished between what we receive through the senses from what we represent
through the intellect, and addressed how they are related. Kant argues for a
deeper difference, arguing that that intuitions are a fundamentally distinct
kind of representation from concepts and belong to their own faculty.
Moreover, intuitions are representations in the pure forms of space and time,
which allow us to represent spatial and temporal features of the world, a role
which had traditionally been assigned to empirical perception. Kant argued
that space and time were forms of intuition, and hence that intuitions could be
not just empirical but pure and a priori. Kant also departs from his predeces-
sors in holding that intuition is required for all theoretical cognition, and in
particular that pure intuition is required for all mathematical cognition. Kant
relies on his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, that is,
those propositions whose truth is grounded in the content of concepts and the
containment relations among them, and those propositions whose truth is not.
Kant claims that mathematical propositions are synthetic, and hence require
intuition, and in particular pure intuition, to ground them. Kant met almost
immediate resistance from philosophers in the continental rationalist tradition
following Leibniz who rejected the claim that theoretical cognition, including
mathematical cognition, depends on a nonconceptual form of representation.
Even some of his allies were troubled and challenged him. They thought that
geometry might plausibly depend on a pure intuition of space, but it is less
obvious that arithmetic and algebra depend in any way on intuition.
Nevertheless, Kant’s critical philosophy and his claim about the role of
intuition in mathematical cognition gained wide influence.
The nineteenth-century arithmetization of mathematics and foundations of
arithmetic arose against this backdrop. Mathematicians answered the call for
rigor to address problems in the foundations of analysis by rejecting any

5
This is a rather rough summary of a complex history. See Sutherland (2020b) for a more
detailed account of Kant’s relation to the history of analysis.

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appeal to intuition, geometrical or otherwise. Far from helping establish

certainty, intuition came be seen as not just unreliable but potentially mislead-
ing. The arithmetization of mathematics meant that more was at stake in
Kant’s claim that intuition is required for arithmetic in particular. At the same
time, the rejection of intuition in arithmetic put great pressure on that claim.
Frege’s development of logic extended what could be expressed and derived
within it, allowing Frege to expand and shift the notion of analyticity and
claim that arithmetic is in fact analytic and does not depend for its justification
on intuition. Russell stated that “formal logic was, in Kant’s day, in a very
much more backward state than at present,” and that properly understood,
mathematical reasoning “requires no extra-logical element” (Russell (1903),
p. 457). He held that advances in both logic and mathematics itself eliminate
the need for intuition. The greater logical resources that could be brought to
bear and the drive to eliminate intuition led Russell to be quite dismissive of
Kant’s philosophy of mathematics.6
Not all agreed with the banishment of intuition, however. Hilbert, Poincare,
and Brouwer each at some point and in their own way defended the idea that
intuition has more than a heuristic role to play in our knowledge of math-
ematics. Some of these defenders looked to Kant for inspiration, even when
their understanding of the role of intuition differed from his. What is striking
from a historical perspective is that, whether one agreed or disagreed with
Kant, the terms of the debate were set by him. But if we are to truly understand
Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, we will have to reconstruct a view of
mathematics prior to its arithmetization, and that requires comprehending
as best we can the idea that mathematics is a science of magnitudes, as well as
Kant’s account of the role of intuition in representing magnitudes both in
mathematics and in experience.
One of the primary aims of this book is to bring to life this older way of
thinking about mathematics. But because our modern way of thinking is
deeply embedded in higher mathematics and even shapes basic mathematics
education, it is difficult to shed our presumptions when reading Kant’s claims
concerning mathematics. The best way to recover the earlier way of thinking is
to return to its roots in Euclid and the Euclidean tradition following him. The
influence of Euclid’s Elements can hardly be overstated; it was the model of
mathematical reasoning and a paradigm of scientific knowledge for more than
two millennia and was responsible for the dominance of geometry over
arithmetic during that time. As De Risi notes, there were hundreds of transla-
tions of and commentaries on the Elements, and its dissemination and

6
See Friedman (1992), especially pp. 55–6, as well as Friedman (2013) for a sustained
argument that we can still learn a great deal from understanding Kant’s views of math-
ematics and natural science, despite – in fact with the aid of – advances in our understand-
ing of logic, mathematics, and physics.

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influence throughout Europe was “only matched by the Bible and by a few
other writings of the Fathers of the Church.”7 Even those who aspired to
replace rather than modify the Elements began their studies with it and reacted
against it. But Euclid’s Elements contains more than mere geometry. An
essential component is a theory of ratios and proportions among magnitudes,
a theory attributed to Eudoxus.8 This crucial part of the Elements set the
framework for thinking about magnitudes in the Euclidean tradition and
persisted into the nineteenth century. The Elements also contains books on
number and the basic properties of numbers, including propositions
governing the ratios and proportions among them. The conception of number
expounded there influenced the understanding of number for nearly two
millennia. The long Euclidean tradition included important challenges and
modifications to the Elements, and there were of course remarkable advances
in mathematics, particularly from the beginning of the Renaissance and
through the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the framework for thinking
about mathematics, and in particular for thinking about the foundations of
mathematics and about mathematical cognition, was strongly influenced by
the Euclidean tradition and the Euclidean theory of magnitudes. That frame-
work was still dominant in the eighteenth century.
We will keep Euclid’s Elements close at hand throughout this book in order
to understand Kant’s very different way of thinking about mathematics. I will
point out ways in which the long Euclidean tradition diverged from Euclid and
describe developments during and after the Renaissance when they are
important for understanding Kant. Obviously, a history of mathematics from
Euclid to the eighteenth century is well beyond the scope of this work and
what I highlight is quite selective. After discussing Kant’s views of mathemat-
ics and magnitudes and their relation to experience in Part I, I will give a
relatively brief and focused presentation of key features of Euclid’s Elements
that shaped the understanding of mathematics into the eighteenth century.
That will put us in a position to dive more deeply into Kant’s understanding of
mathematics and its relation to the world in Part II.
Recovering Kant’s understanding of mathematics requires a shift not just in
an understanding of foundations, but in their aim. During and after the
arithmetization of mathematics, the goal of foundations was to resolve various
problems in analysis and to explain the nature of numbers by giving an
account of certain mathematical notions (real, rational, natural numbers), in
terms of more basic notions (rational numbers, natural numbers, logical and
set-theoretic notions, respectively), and to do so in a rigorous way that would

7
De Risi (2016, p. 592).
8
Euclid compiled previous works of mathematics in writing the Elements, and the basic
content of parts of it was attributed to various authors, including Eudoxus, as will be
discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

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ground inferences. The primary focus was on providing a foundation for

mathematics itself. Kant’s aims were quite different. First and foremost,
Kant wished to provide an explanation of the possibility of mathematical
cognition, which includes both basic judgments, such as the judgment that
there are seven apples in the bowl on the table, as well as what is required for
higher mathematics, pure and applied, such as the derivation of Newton’s law
of universal gravitation. Kant’s aim is to provide an explanation of mathemat-
ical cognition in terms of our most basic cognitive capacities. Those elements
are the categories and the pure forms of intuition, so that Kant’s explanation of
the possibility of mathematical cognition is grounded in them.
This is not to say, however, that Kant had first settled on his theory of the
categories and pure intuition, even its general shape, before addressing the
foundations of mathematical cognition. Indeed, Kant’s reflections on math-
ematical cognition, particularly in the Prize Essay period in the years 1762–4,
was a driving force in the development of his critical philosophy, including his
conviction that there is a class of truths that cannot be reduced to logical
relations among concepts and that we have pure forms of a priori intuition.
The development of Kant’s critical understanding of the categories and the
pure forms of intuition was strongly influenced by his philosophy of math-
ematics, and it offers more insights than have been generally appreciated. This
is a story worthy of its own monograph, but it is one we will have to largely set
aside here.9
What is important for our present purposes is that Kant’s primary aim with
respect to mathematics was to provide a foundation of mathematical cognition
rather than a foundation of mathematics in our modern sense. The two sorts
of foundations are inextricably linked; nineteenth-century foundations were
often motivated by epistemological concerns, and Kant’s understanding of
mathematical cognition is conditioned by his understanding of the nature of
mathematics. There is no easy division between the two. Nevertheless, the
difference in focus and emphasis between Kant and post–eighteenth-century
approaches is significant. In Kant’s account, we attain mathematical know-
ledge through our cognition of magnitudes, and hence the focus of his
foundations is on explaining our ability to cognize magnitudes in both pure
mathematics and in experience. This is not to say that one cannot learn a great
deal about Kant’s philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science by
foregrounding Kant’s interaction with the mathematics and science of his day,
while leaving Kant’s account of our cognition of magnitudes in the back-
ground; indeed, a good deal of very good work in recent decades has done just

9
For relatively recent work focusing specifically on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics in
and after the Prize Essay period, see especially Carson (1992), Rechter (2006), and R. L.
Anderson (2015).

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that. But the focus of the present work will be on Kant’s account of the
foundations of mathematical cognition as a cognition of magnitudes.

1.3 Mathematics in Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy

As I have already indicated, understanding Kant’s theory of magnitudes is not
merely crucial for his philosophy of mathematics; it is important for his entire
critical philosophy. Because it is more important than is often recognized, this
claim is worth defending here at the outset, though it is the book as a whole
that makes the case.
Kant’s mature philosophy only emerged with the Critique of Pure Reason
(henceforth Critique),10 but Kant’s early reflections on mathematical cognition
in 1762–4 were a key factor in moving Kant toward his view of the role of
intuition in human cognition. Kant’s reflections on the possibility of demon-
strating God’s existence during this period were certainly important to his
critical assessment of and emancipation from Leibnizian and Wolffian meta-
physics, as is clear in his essay The Only Possible Argument for the Existence of
God. It was, however, his investigation of mathematical cognition in Inquiry
Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology of Morals
(henceforth either Inquiry or Prize Essay) and Attempt to Introduce the
Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (henceforth Negative
Magnitudes) that convinced him that Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism
based solely on conceptual representation and the relations among concepts
could not account for mathematical cognition, and moved him toward his
understanding of pure intuition and its role in human cognition.11 I primarily
focus on Kant’s views in the critical period, in which the influence of his
philosophy of mathematics on his theoretical philosophy is readily apparent,
at several different levels.
The first level of that influence is well known, but bears review. Kant states
in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (henceforth Prolegomena) that
metaphysicians must answer the question, “How are synthetic a priori cogni-
tions possible?” and that the whole of transcendental philosophy is the answer
(4:278–9). Kant claims that if metaphysics were possible, it would rest on
synthetic a priori cognitions, but that it is disputable whether there are any

10
Despite the deep importance of the two other critiques to Kant’s philosophy as a whole,
I will usually refer to The Critique of Pure Reason simply as the Critique. Our focus will be
primarily on the role of magnitude in Kant’s account of theoretical cognition in the
Critique of Pure Reason, save one relatively short excursion into the Critique of Judgment.
11
See R. L. Anderson (2015) for a recent particularly lucid and helpful account of Kant’s
reaction to Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism, with a focus on the development of
Kant’s understanding of the analytic-synthetic distinction starting in the pre-critical
period. For a broader account of Kant’s reaction to rationalism, see Hogan (2009).

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such cognitions to support metaphysics at all. Nevertheless, Kant says, to

motivate and justify the question of how synthetic a priori knowledge is
possible, we need not first establish that it is possible, because it is actual: we
have clear examples of synthetic a priori cognitions in pure mathematics and
pure natural science (4:275). Kant claims that we can “confidently say” that
pure mathematics and pure natural science contain a priori cognitions; he
adds that their status is “uncontested,” and that these examples are “plenty and
indeed with indisputable certainty actually given” (4:276). This is what justifies
the analytic method he says he employs in the Prolegomena, that is, starting
from the fact that we have synthetic a priori knowledge and seeking an
explanation for its possibility (4:279).
Although Kant claims to employ the synthetic method in the Critique, and
so presumably does not start with the assumption that we have a specific sort
of cognition and then seek its explanation, he makes claims similar to the
Prolegomena about the cognitions of pure mathematics and pure natural
science. In the B-Introduction, for example, he states that, in contrast to the
status of the propositions of metaphysics, pure mathematics “certainly con-
tains synthetic a priori propositions” (B20). He also adds that since mathemat-
ics and pure natural science “are actually given, it can appropriately be asked
how they are possible; for that they must be possible is proved through their
actuality” (B20).
It is important, of course, to distinguish between the claim that the propos-
itions of pure mathematics and pure natural science are indisputably certain,
and the claim that their status as synthetic a priori cognitions is indisputably
certain. The certainty of 2 + 2 = 4 is not the same as the certainty that this
proposition is synthetic a priori, and although Kant states that their status as
synthetic a priori cognitions is uncontested, he gives arguments to support his
claim. Even the Prolegomena, which he says employs the analytic method and
hence assumes that we have synthetic a priori cognition, provides consider-
ations in favor of this claim in the Preamble. His tone in both the Prolegomena
and the Critique, however, suggests that little real argument is needed, only
careful reflection in light of the proper characterizations of the a priori/a
posteriori and analytic/synthetic distinctions. The considerations Kant brings
to bear in the B-Introduction of the Critique borrow almost verbatim from the
Prolegomena Preamble. Concerning the apriority of mathematical judgments,
Kant treats it as sufficient to simply attend to marks of apriority. Kant argues
that necessity and universality are sure criteria of a priori cognitions and that
this makes it is easy to show that there are a priori judgments in human
cognition: “one need only look at all the propositions of mathematics,” and
he seems to think that no more argument is required. He also states that in the
proposition “every event has a cause,” the concept of a cause “obviously”
contains the concept of necessity, which he cites in support of his claim that
the proposition is necessary (B4–5).

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The same tone is present in his claim that these judgments are synthetic.
Kant states that the fact that mathematical judgments are all synthetic “seems
to have escaped the notice of the analysts of human reason,” yet is “incon-
trovertibly certain.” He also claims that the syntheticity of propositions of pure
natural science, such as “in all alterations of the corporeal world the quantity
of matter remains unaltered,” is clear (A10/B14). Kant’s stance on the exist-
ence of synthetic a priori cognitions is especially apparent in his Prolegomena
discussion of Hume, when he suggests that if Hume had only been armed with
the right distinctions and asked the right questions, it would have been clear to
him that mathematics consists of synthetic a priori cognitions (4:272–3).
As Lanier Anderson as rightly emphasized, these passages can sound like
mere table-thumping. In particular, Kant needs further argument for his claim
that the propositions of pure mathematics and pure natural science are
synthetic if he is going to do more than simply beg the question against the
Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalists, who would argue that all a priori truths,
indeed all properly articulated and grounded truths, are analytic.12
The a priori status of the cognitions of pure mathematics and pure natural
science would have required less argument – at least for pure mathematics.
The intended target of Kant’s polemic included both Leibnizian rationalists
and that version of a Humean empiricism that concedes the necessity of
mathematical propositions. (Kant does not seem to have taken seriously the
possibility of an empiricism that denied the necessity of mathematics.)
Philosophers as opposed in outlook and approach as Leibniz and Hume
accepted both that particular sense experiences cannot provide knowledge of
necessity and that mathematical propositions are necessary, and hence a
priori, while disagreeing on the significance of those propositions. By focusing
on Leibnizian rationalism and Humean empiricism, Kant could count on the
claim that pure mathematics is a priori.
On the other hand, the nature of the dependence of natural science on
empirical observation would have led empiricists to balk at Kant’s claim that
there is a pure natural science containing a priori propositions. Kant himself
holds that a great part of natural science is grounded on empirical principles.
In the B-Preface, for example, Kant cites the work of Galileo, Torricelli, and
Stahl as examples of natural science grounded on empirical principles (Bxii–
xiii), and to this list he would have added the contributions of many others,
including Copernicus and Kepler. And Kant acknowledges that natural science
relies on experience in a way that mathematics does not:
[pure mathematics] is supported by its own evidence; whereas [pure
natural science], though arising from pure sources of the understanding,

12
L. Anderson (2005) is a sustained and illuminating investigation of what that non-
question-begging argument looks like.

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is nonetheless supported from experience and thoroughgoing confirm-

ation by it – experience being a witness that natural science cannot fully
renounce and dispense with, because, as philosophy, despite all its cer-
tainty it can never rival mathematics. (4:327)
For all this, Kant insists that there is a pure part of natural science that contains
synthetic a priori principles, such as “substance remains and persists” and
“everything that happens is always previously determined by a cause according
to constant laws” (4:295). These are claims that empiricists would strongly resist.
How does Kant support his claim that pure natural science contains syn-
thetic a priori principles? At B17–18, Kant states that he will “adduce only a
couple of propositions as examples” of pure natural science and simply asserts
that it is clear that they are synthetic and a priori, which sounds again like
mere table-thumping. But it is noteworthy that in the Prolegomena passage in
which Kant suggests that Hume could have recognized that we have synthetic
a priori cognitions, Kant refers only to pure mathematics, and not to natural
science. And in the Introduction of the Critique, Kant acknowledges that the a
priori status of natural science would be contested. In a footnote following his
claim that the possibility of pure mathematics and pure natural science are
given by their actuality, he states:
Some may still doubt this last point in the case of pure natural science. Yet
one need merely consider the various propositions that come forth at the
outset of proper (empirical) physics, such as those of the persistence of the
same quantity of matter, of inertia, of the equality of effect and counter-
effect, etc., and one will quickly be convinced that they constitute a
physica pura (or rationalis).. . . (B21n)
While acknowledging the challenge, he simply reiterates that if one merely
considers these propositions, one will be quickly convinced. This would hardly
have moved an empiricist such as Hume, who explicitly argued against the
necessity of natural laws and against the legitimacy of a concept of causality
that attributed a necessary connection between events. As a consequence,
Kant’s arguments that were intended to target both his rationalist and empiri-
cist predecessors are not nearly as strongly supported by his appeal to pure
natural science as by his appeal to pure mathematics. Kant must still make
good on his claim that the a priori propositions of mathematics are also
synthetic; nevertheless, it is pure mathematics that carries the water. Since
Kant would stake his entire philosophy on the answer to the question, “How is
synthetic a priori knowledge possible?,” pure mathematics plays a particularly
important role in Kant’s argument for his critical philosophy. This level of
influence of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics on his critical philosophy is
clear to every reader of Kant.
The importance of mathematics in Kant’s critical philosophy is not, how-
ever, limited to establishing the fact that there are synthetic a priori cognitions.

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The answer to the question of how they are possible also informs us about all
synthetic a priori cognition, and hence informs Kant’s critical philosophy at a
deeper level. In the Prolegomena, Kant states that we only need to ask how
pure mathematics and pure natural science is possible “in order to be able to
derive, from the principle of the possibility of the given cognition, the possi-
bility of all other synthetic cognition a priori” (4:275). They do so because they
“bring to light a higher question concerning their common origin” (4:280),
that is, the common origin of pure mathematics, pure natural science, and
metaphysics as a science.
The Prolegomena provides a concise statement of what he has in mind.
After explaining how pure mathematics is possible, he states in §11 that the
problem has been solved, and summarizes the solution:
Pure mathematics, as synthetic cognition a priori, is possible only because
it refers to no other objects than mere objects of the senses, the empirical
intuition of which is based on a pure and indeed a priori intuition (of
space and time), and can be so based because this pure intuition is
nothing but the mere form of sensibility, which precedes the actual
appearance of objects, since it in fact first makes this appearance possible.
(4:284).

Kant takes himself to have established not just how mathematical cognition is
possible, but important features of our empirical intuition of objects of the
senses. Empirical intuition of such objects is based on a pure a priori intuition
of space and time that is the mere form of sensibility, that precedes the actual
appearance of objects, and which makes the empirical intuition of objects of
the senses possible. Kant has arrived at these conclusions by reflection on the
nature of mathematical cognition: “all mathematical cognition has this distin-
guishing feature, that it must present its concept beforehand in intuition and
indeed a priori, consequently in an intuition that is not empirical but pure,
without which means it cannot take a single step” (4:281). He then elaborates:
mathematics “must be grounded in some pure intuition or other, in which it
can present, or as one calls it, construct all of its concepts in concreto yet a
priori.” He does not argue further in the Prolegomena for these claims about
the nature of mathematical cognition; he takes them for granted. He then
argues from them for the conclusions noted above: that intuition is nothing
but the form of sensibility; synthetic a priori propositions concerning pure
intuition are valid for, and only valid for, objects of the senses; and empirical
intuition is based on a pure a priori intuition of space and time.
Kant states that he employs the synthetic method in the Critique of Pure
Reason, and reaches the same conclusions concerning our empirical intuition
of objects of the senses in a different way. The Transcendental Aesthetic begins
with reflections on our faculties and its representations, claiming that the form
of sensible intuitions, and hence the form of empirical intuitions and

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appearances, must be a priori. The metaphysical expositions of the concepts of

space and time then argue that space and time are pure a priori intuitions, and
draws similar conclusions to the passage just cited from the Prolegomena. But
in the B-edition, he only draws these conclusions after adding two additional
sections, the transcendental expositions of the concept of space and of
the concept of time, each expanding on a corresponding paragraph in the
A-edition. Both the A-edition paragraphs and the B-edition transcendental
expositions have the general form of the analytic method purportedly followed
in the Prolegomena; they assume that we have synthetic a priori cognition in
mathematics, and ask after the conditions of their possibility. In the case of the
B-edition transcendental exposition of the concept space, Kant backs up the
assumption that geometrical propositions are synthetic and a priori by refer-
ring to the B-Introduction discussion of apriority and syntheticity – sections
that Kant borrowed from the Preamble of the Prolegomena in rewriting the
Critique.13
Why does Kant include the transcendental exposition of space in the
B-edition Critique, despite the fact that the transcendental exposition appar-
ently follows the analytic method of the Prolegomena? The answer lies in a not
overly strict application of the notions of analytic and synthetic method. It also
likely lies in part in the fact that Kant finds the argument compelling, so that if
the B-Introduction is successful at getting his readers to reflect on mathemat-
ical knowledge in light of the distinctions between a posteriori and a priori as
well as analytic and synthetic, and to concede that at least geometry is
synthetic a priori, they will be convinced of the role pure forms of intuition
play in human cognition. The answer is also likely in part because it was Kant’s
early reflections on the nature of intuitive certainty in mathematics and on the
limitations of Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism that eventually led him to
his view of the role of the pure forms of intuition in mathematical cognition
and from that to their role in all theoretical cognition. In the elucidation of the
Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant concludes:
Time and space are accordingly two sources of cognition, from which
different synthetic cognitions can be drawn a priori, of which especially
pure mathematics in regard to the cognitions of space and its relations
provides a splendid example. Both taken together are, namely, the pure
forms of all sensible intuition, and thereby make possible synthetic a
priori propositions. (A38–9/B5–6)

13
Kant gives shorter shrift to the transcendental exposition of the concept of time. The
synthetic a priori principles in that case are not described as mathematical. In the A-
edition paragraph, the synthetic a priori principles include the “axioms of time in
general,” for example, the principles that time has only one dimension, and that different
times are not simultaneous, but successive. In the B-edition, Kant adds the synthetic a
priori cognitions of “the general theory of motion.”

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Kant’s early reflections on pure mathematical cognition led him to develop his
account of the pure forms of intuition, which he subsequently held to play a
role in all synthetic a priori propositions and indeed even in all empirical
intuitions. Kant’s understanding of mathematical cognition thus had a pro-
found influence on the doctrine of the Transcendental Aesthetic concerning
human cognition: that all human cognition, empirical as well as pure, depends
on two distinct kinds of representation, concepts and intuitions, and that each
belongs to its own faculty, the understanding and sensibility.
This level of influence of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics on his account
of theoretical cognition is also familiar to careful readers of Kant. Yet the
influence of Kant’s understanding of mathematical cognition on his critical
philosophy extends to an even deeper level that may be less familiar, and that
is the topic of this book. The passages from the Prolegomena quoted above
connect the possibility of the synthetic a priori cognitions of mathematics to
objects of the senses, and assert that the empirical intuition of those objects is
in turn based on pure a priori intuition. This suggests, but does not explicitly
say, that the role of pure a priori intuition in our cognition of empirical objects
is one and the same as in mathematical cognition. That is in fact Kant’s view,
which becomes apparent once one appreciates the role of magnitudes in both,
which we will more carefully consider in Chapters 2 and 3. In brief, appear-
ances are, with respect to their intuition in space and time, magnitudes, and
mathematical cognition is cognition of magnitudes. Kant argues in the Axioms
of Intuition that appearances are taken up into empirical consciousness
through a synthesis that generates the representation of the determinate space
or time contained in the appearance. This determinate space or time is a
magnitude, and the synthesis that generates these representations is the same
synthesis of space and time by means of which the concept of magnitude is
constructed in intuition. That is, it is the same synthesis that underlies
mathematical cognition.
As a result, our cognition of appearances and mathematical cognition are
interwoven; they are both based on a common synthesis generating represen-
tations of determinate spaces and times. The Axioms of Intuition is a further
elaboration of a position Kant already describes in §26 of the B-Deduction
with respect to spatial magnitudes.14 I will only briefly summarize the argu-
ment he makes there. Kant argues that all apprehension must agree with the
synthetic unity of space and time represented as intuitions, and argues that
this synthetic unity is the synthetic unity of an original consciousness in
agreement with the categories. He concludes that the synthesis that makes
perception possible stands under the categories. Kant then illustrates his

14
I will sometimes call the Axioms of Intuition simply the “Axioms,” with capitalization
and in the singular, to refer to the section of the Critique with that title.

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conclusion with two examples, the first of which is the perception of a house.
He states that I perceive it through the apprehension of its manifold and “I as
it were draw its shape [Ich zeichne gleichsam seine Gestalt] in agreement with
this synthetic unity of the manifold in space” (B162). Furthermore, if I abstract
from the form of space, the synthetic unity is the category of magnitude.
There are three points to make about his example. Kant’s reference to the
category of magnitude is a reference to the categories of quantity, and in virtue
of standing under the categories of quantity, the synthesis of the manifold of
space and time required for perception generates a representation of a magni-
tude. Second, the representation generated in this case is the shape of the
perceived object. Third, the representation is generated by an “as it were”
drawing of the shape. Geometrical cognition is based on the same synthesis in
the drawing of shapes in spatial intuition. In geometry, this drawing is an act
made explicit in the construction of geometrical figures, while in perception it
is only implicit and, because it is an “as it were” drawing of its shape, perhaps
only corresponds in some way to a temporally extended act of drawing a
figure. Our perception of the house is nevertheless based on the very same
synthesis that underlies the representation of spatial magnitudes in geometry.
The world acquires its mathematical character, and mathematics applies to it,
in virtue of the synthesis that generates representations of magnitude.
Not only the spatial and temporal features of appearances have a mathemat-
ical character. The real of appearances corresponding to sensations has an
intensive magnitude, and thereby also acquires a mathematical character. It is
important to appreciate that every real property of an object corresponding to
a sensation has an intensive magnitude. A light source is a paradigm example
of something real that has an intensive magnitude, which is also true of the
light reflected by an object. It is particularly important that Kant also singles
out motion and forces as having intensive magnitudes, both of which are at the
heart of his account of the physical world and the laws of nature.
As a consequence, Kant’s account of mathematical cognition does not
simply provide a clear example of synthetic a priori knowledge, nor does the
role of intuition in that account merely point to pure intuition as the ground of
synthetic a priori cognitions and intuition as a necessary condition of cogni-
tion more generally. Kant incorporates mathematical cognition, and the role of
pure intuition in mathematical cognition, into his account of our cognition of
all features of the objects of experience. That is one reason we cannot fully
appreciate Kant’s account of experience without understanding his philosophy
of mathematics and the theory of magnitudes on which it rests.
One might take a quite different view, attempting to separate the conditions
of the possibility of experience from the conditions of the possibility of the
exact sciences, drawing a line separating, on the one hand, Kant’s account of
ordinary everyday experience of trees and tables and chairs and, on the other,
his account of mathematics and mathematical physics. This might be

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encouraged by the strong distinction Kant draws between philosophical and

mathematical cognition, and the fact that the conditions of possible experience
articulated in the system of principles of the Critique are established through
philosophical cognition and belong to philosophy. This approach to under-
standing Kant would acknowledge that the principles of the Axioms of
Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception establish the applicability of
mathematics to objects of experience in virtue of their being magnitudes.
Nevertheless, being a magnitude is a feature of appearances, and mathematical
cognition has some other relation to intuition than through the representation
of magnitudes. I will argue that this understanding of Kant is fundamentally
mistaken. Kant’s account of the conditions of the possibility of experience
incorporate the conditions of the possibility of mathematical cognition, and it
does so through the representation of magnitudes in intuition.

1.4 Kantian Transformations

As I remarked above, Kant’s account of the role of magnitudes in mathematics
and experience is nuanced and complex. While mathematical cognition and
the cognition of objects of experience are grounded in the representation of
magnitudes, that alone is not sufficient to explain mathematical cognition or
the mathematical character of experience. The Euclidean theory of magnitudes
that shaped the understanding of mathematics into the eighteenth century was
based on the Eudoxian theory of the ratios and proportions that governs the
mathematical relations among magnitudes. Euclid does not define the notion
of magnitude, so that the meaning of magnitude is implicitly characterized by
its role in the Eudoxian theory, which attributes mathematical relations to
them; as a consequence, the Euclidean notion of magnitude is mathematical.
But as we shall see, Kant does not simply adopt the theory of magnitudes
found in the Euclidean tradition. He presses deeper, and reworks it in light of
his project to explain the possibility of mathematical cognition. As a conse-
quence, Kant defines magnitude in a way that departs from the implicit
definition of magnitude found in the Euclidean tradition; his account is
mereological. Kant thinks that the mereological properties of intuition and
the special sort of synthesis involved in the representation of the part–whole
relations of intuition are at the foundation of all mathematics. But in order to
achieve properly mathematical cognition, the relation of equality and the
possibility of a pure form of measurement are also required. A goal of this
book is to describe these additional requirements that bridge the gap between
Kant’s mereological characterization of magnitude and the Euclidean math-
ematical conception of magnitude.
Kant’s reworking of the Euclidean tradition concerning magnitudes brings
out another theme of this book. Kant’s philosophy is repeatedly revolutionary.
He brings a new level of reflection and sophistication to old philosophical

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debates, quite often transforming the terms of debate in the process. Three
examples we’ve touched on in his theoretical philosophy include his articula-
tion of the analytic/synthetic distinction; his separation of it from the a priori/
a posteriori distinction; and his introduction of a unique faculty of sensibility,
to which a kind of representation distinct from concepts belongs, a represen-
tation that can be a priori. But what is also noteworthy is that Kant does not
simply reject previous theorizing and attempt to start from a clean slate. Kant
is not one who believes in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Kant’s
reactions to his empiricist and rationalist predecessors is a good example. His
critical philosophy is deeply influenced by and includes many elements of
both: a critical stance rooted in a demand for a justification of the claims of
philosophy and the project of sharply curtailing the pretensions of metaphys-
ics, coupled with an insistence that we can have a priori knowledge.
Kant has a characteristic manner of not throwing out the baby with the
bathwater: he alters theories at their foundations in a way that preserves many
of the key claims of those theories that he thinks are, if properly understood
and formulated, correct. We can even see this in Kant’s relation to his earlier
philosophy. The Inquiry of 1763, for example, provides a catalog of ways in
which philosophical cognition differs from mathematical cognition. Many of
the insights he gained in that essay are found in the Discipline of Pure Reason
in the Critique, despite the fact that at the time of writing the Inquiry, Kant
had not yet distinguished understanding and sensibility, nor articulated the
properties of intuitive representations and developed a theory of pure intu-
ition, nor developed his doctrine of the construction of concepts, nor
developed his transcendental idealism. Despite tectonic shifts in the develop-
ment of his views, he retains many of the same contrasts between mathemat-
ical and philosophical cognition.
Kant employs a similar strategy in reforming the rationalist metaphysics of
quantity that he inherited from Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten. As we shall
see in Chapter 8, these philosophers provided metaphysical definitions of
quality and quantity that served their larger purpose of incorporating math-
ematics into metaphysics. It was a criterion of success that they be able to
define similarity as identity of quality and equality as identity of quantity in a
way that corresponds to the geometrical notions of similarity and equality.
Kant alters the metaphysics of quantity at its foundation in order to incorpor-
ate it into his theory of magnitudes and in particular the role of intuition in it;
at the same time, he preserves the distinction between quality and quantity
and the definitions of similarity and equality that correspond to the geomet-
rical notions of similarity and equality.15

15
Michael Friedman emphasizes the same transformative approach in Kant’s philosophy of
nature. In the Physical Monadology, written in the pre-critical period, Kant attempted to
reconcile Newtonian natural philosophy with Leibniz’s metaphysics by altering both. In

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Most importantly for this book, the same point applies to Kant’s interaction
with the Euclidean tradition. Kant’s fundamental reworking of the Euclidean
theory of magnitudes will be the topic of Chapter 7. Kant introduces a
definition of magnitude suited to explain our cognition of magnitudes in
terms of our more basic cognitive capacities, in particular, the categories of
quantity and the pure forms of space and time. But he does so in a way that
lays the foundation for and retains what he sees as valuable in the traditional
theory of magnitudes that set the basic framework for thinking about math-
ematics into the eighteenth century. Thus, Kant reforms both the Euclidean
mathematical tradition and Leibnizian metaphysics of quantity in order to
explain the possibility of mathematical cognition as a cognition of magnitudes,
and he does so in a way that preserves what he thinks is correct in each.

1.5 Kant’s Theory of Magnitudes and Kant Interpretation

There has been a tremendous amount of scholarship on Kant’s critical phil-
osophy and his philosophy of mathematics since the appearance of the
Critique, far too much to survey. If a theory of magnitude is at the foundation
of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics and also plays a prominent role in his
account of experience, one might well wonder how it could be that it has not
been sufficiently appreciated until now and take this as a prima facie reason
against the interpretation given here.
I have already mentioned the most important reason undermining an
understanding of Kant’s views today: conceiving of mathematics as a science
of magnitudes is quite foreign to our modern understanding after the arith-
metization of mathematics. If one is not attuned to the theory of magnitude,
the significance of Kant’s many references to magnitude are easy to pass over
as merely an antiquated manner of expression.
But there are other reasons as well, which would have obscured Kant’s views
even in his own time. Writing in the eighteenth century, Kant could count on his
readers to be familiar in a general way with the theory of magnitudes in the
Euclidean tradition. It was common to think of mathematics as the science of
magnitudes and their measurement. Even Euler, whom one might think unlikely
to do so, invokes magnitudes and their measurement to characterize the science
of mathematics. For example, at the very beginning of the Elements of Algebra, in
“Chapter 1: Of Mathematics in General,” Euler states that “Mathematics in

the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science during the critical period, Kant provides
a foundation of Newtonian natural science that preserves it, while at the same time
rejecting an appeal to Newtonian absolute space and time and providing an alternative
understanding of them. This radically reconceives the foundations of Newton’s natural
science, while preserving what follows from those foundations. See Friedman (1992) and
Friedman (2013).

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general is nothing but a science of magnitudes, and seeks the means of measuring
them,” explaining that “Whatever is capable of increase or decrease, or to which
something can be added or from which something can be taken away, is called
magnitude.”16 This is not to say that Euler had a fully developed view of the
foundations of mathematics based on the theory of magnitudes. His remarks
come at the beginning of introductory texts, and he quickly moves on. The theory
of magnitudes was more of a shared common background than an established
and worked-out theory, and even the basic vocabulary was not fixed; the term
“magnitude” was often used in ambiguous ways, sometimes by the same author,
as was the term “quantity.” Kant made progress by distinguishing between two
senses of magnitude, quanta and quantitas, but then sometimes reverts to simply
using “magnitude” without specifying which he has in mind. Kant is not
renowned for the clear exposition of his views, and he would have needed to do
more to make them perspicuous even to his contemporaries.
Kant would have helped matters by devoting a monograph or at least an
essay to the philosophy of mathematics, but he did not.17 One can only wish
that Kant had written a work that does for his philosophy of mathematics
what the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science does for his account of
Newtonian physics. In fact, Kant may have had such a work in mind. He refers
to the topic of metaphysical foundations of mathematics in several lecture
notes and reflections, indicating that it would concern the cognition of mag-
nitudes. In one of his reflections, for example, Kant refers to the “Metaphysics
of the doctrine of magnitude or the metaphysical foundations of mathematics”
(Reflexionen 14:195–6, 1764–1804), and in lectures given between the appear-
ance of the two editions of the Critique, Kant is reported as saying:
Even mathematics presents a metaphysics: it concerns objects only insofar
as they have a magnitude, and reason’s general application of principles to
all objects lies at the foundation of all mathematics and is its metaphysics.
(Metaphysik Mongrovius 1782–3, 29:755)
Even mathematics requires a metaphysics, since for all mathematical
cognition the principles of metaphysics [derselben] must lie at their
foundation, which one can represent as a metaphysics of mathematics.
(Metaphysik Volckmann 1784–5, 28:636)

16
Euler (1802, pp. 3–4).
17
The closest we have is his Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into
Philosophy of 1764. As noted above, it and the Inquiry provided an important impetus
toward the critical philosophy, but it was written well before Kant developed some of the
most important tenets of his critical philosophy. The present book focuses on Kant’s
understanding of magnitude in the critical period. Since there is sufficient evidence for
the argument I make based on texts in the critical period, I will only incidentally refer to
Negative Magnitudes; a work devoted to the development of Kant’s critical philosophy
would provide a thorough treatment.

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While it is possible that Kant is simply referring to the account of mathemat-

ical cognition in the Critique, Kant’s distinguishing and denoting a metaphys-
ics of mathematics suggests something more systematic that would constitute
its own treatise.18
Unfortunately for us, Kant did not write such a work, so we are forced to
rely on other texts, and above all on Kant’s most extensive account of
theoretical cognition, the Critique. But the structure of the Critique itself is a
further obstacle to understanding his account of mathematical cognition and
its role in experience. The transcendental deduction of the categories aims to
establish the objective validity of the categories by showing that they are
conditions of the possibility of experience. The system of principles expands
on the transcendental deduction to explain principles that follow from the
employment of the categories under the conditions of sensibility and demon-
strates that the principles are conditions for the possibility of experience. The
Axioms of Intuition and Anticipations of Perception do this for the categories
of quantity and quality, respectively, and in accomplishing this task, they also
establish the applicability of mathematics to experience. Throughout, the focus
is on the conditions of the possibility of experience, and there is no natural
place in the organization of the Critique for a thorough account of mathemat-
ical cognition itself. Kant does give a partial account in the Discipline of Pure
Reason, but his primary aim there is to distinguish it from philosophical
cognition, and it is hardly an adequate exposition of his views. Moreover,
the focus of the system of principles on the conditions of experience seems to
relegate Kant’s discussion of magnitudes in the Axioms and Anticipations to
only an issue of the applicability of mathematics to objects of experience,
which can be taken to suggest that pure mathematics is something separate
that is then applied to them.
As a consequence, we must glean what we can from his surprisingly few and
disparate discussions of mathematics. Most of these occur in the context of
arguing for a particular claim: that mathematical cognitions are synthetic, for
example, or that there are no axioms of quantitas and hence no axioms of
arithmetic. The arguments are often brief even for the point he is making, and
are not intended to be a full explication of mathematical cognition. Sometimes,

18
On the other hand, Kant’s reflections in the late 1790s include the claim that a philo-
sophical foundation of mathematics is unthinkable (21:240; see also 21:242, 21:555,
22:544). He gives an example, which reveals in what sense it is impossible: philosophy
cannot prove mathematical propositions. This is something on which Kant insisted
throughout his career, from the Inquiry in the period of 1763–4, through 1797–9. The
contrast with the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science derives in part because the
latter work presupposes mathematics, and is able to establish a priori results based on
mathematical constructions. In contrast, a Philosophical Foundations of Mathematics
could at best provide an account of the cognitive foundations of mathematics. It is such
a work we might have wished for.

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his comments are in such opaque contexts, such as his discussion of number in
the Schematism, that they bring more confusion than clarity. Any investi-
gation of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics must therefore struggle to put
these pieces together.
Moving forward again to the twentieth century, there were additional
factors that led to relative neglect of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics by
many mainstream Kant scholars, and hence a failure to uncover his theory of
magnitudes. I noted above that not everyone fell in line with the Russellian
view that Kant’s philosophy of mathematics was deeply mistaken and had no
value, but the view was widely influential. Similar judgments were passed on
Kant’s views on natural science after Einstein’s overthrow of Newtonian
physics. These assessments encouraged many who worked on Kant to jettison
his views on mathematics and natural science and focus instead on Kant’s
metaphysics and epistemology and his broader philosophical contributions.19
This reinforced an understanding of Kant’s notion of experience as an ordin-
ary, everyday kind of shared human experience that need not take into
account Kant’s philosophy of mathematics or natural science. As mentioned
above, the strong distinction Kant draws between philosophical cognition and
mathematical cognition may have reinforced this approach to Kant’s philoso-
phy. The result was that Kant’s philosophy of mathematics mostly remained of
interest to a minority of philosophers of mathematics, while it was for the
most part passed over by those interested in Kant’s philosophy more generally,
especially in the Anglo-American tradition.
There was yet a further reason for the neglect of Kant’s theory of magni-
tudes in much Kant scholarship. Many rightly saw Kant’s philosophy as an
important reaction to Hume’s views, especially with regard to causation, and
they paid particular attention to Kant’s response to Hume in the Analogies of
Experience, above all the Second Analogy, which drew attention away from
the role of the Axioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception and
their treatment of magnitudes. This is not to say that mathematical cognition
was deemed irrelevant to Kant’s account of human experience. There was
appreciation of the importance of Kant’s claim that mathematics is synthetic a
priori in Kant’s argument for the critical philosophy, and of the fact that Kant
aims to establish the applicability of mathematics to experience in the Axioms
of Intuition. But there was relatively little attention paid to the role of Kant’s
theory of magnitudes, and his account of experience was thought to be largely
detachable from the details of his philosophy of mathematics.
Despite all these obstacles, however, there was continued interest in Kant’s
philosophy of mathematics among some philosophers, particularly some

19
There were notable exceptions of course; this does not do justice to the neo-Kantian
movement nor to logical positivists, who attempted to learn from Kant’s interaction with
mathematics and science even while disagreeing with him on fundamental issues.

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philosophers of mathematics. In the 1960s, the work of Jaakko Hintikka and

Charles Parsons led to a resurgence of interest in Kant’s philosophy of
mathematics in Anglo-American philosophy, and generated a debate on the
roles of the singularity and immediacy of intuition. A great amount of
excellent work on various aspects of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics has
been published since – too much to list here – and a great deal of it does not
require an appreciation of Kant’s theory of magnitudes. Nevertheless, a new
appreciation of the importance of Kant’s understanding of magnitude
emerged in Parson’s 1984 “Arithmetic and the Categories,” while Michael
Friedman’s 1992 Kant and the Exact Sciences, for the first time to my know-
ledge, explicitly connected Kant’s views of magnitude to the Eudoxian theory
of proportions in Euclid and gave an account of Kant’s distinction between
two sorts of magnitude, quanta and quantitas. The present book was inspired
by and is an extension of this line of research. It provides a deeper analysis of
Kant’s views and their relation to the Euclidean tradition and a places greater
emphasis on the systematic influence of the theory of magnitudes on Kant’s
philosophy of mathematics and his account of experience. It also argues that
there is a role for intuition in representing magnitudes, and consequently in
both mathematical cognition and the cognition of appearances, that has not
been recognized before.

1.6 Overview of the Work

The book divides into three parts. The first establishes that Kant’s theory of
magnitudes is fundamental to his thinking about mathematical cognition and
his account of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason. Chapter 2 gives
breathing space to Kant’s theory of magnitudes by addressing potential con-
fusions about the structure of the Critique and Kant’s treatment of space, time,
and mathematics that can obscure the significance of that theory. Kant’s
Critique makes important claims about space, time, and mathematics in both
the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Axioms of Intuition, claims that appear
to overlap in some ways and contradict in others. Both discuss mathematics
and lay claim to establishing the applicability of mathematics to experience,
yet each discusses space and time in quite different ways, particularly with
respect to the relative priority of parts to whole. Against this background, most
interpretations of the Axioms of Intuition only attribute to it the role of
establishing the applicability of mathematics to experience or introducing a
metric, and have in the process overlooked the broader significance of Kant’s
theory of magnitudes. Chapter 2 argues for an interpretation that accords the
Axioms of Intuition more importance than it is usually given for all math-
ematical cognition, including pure mathematical cognition.
Chapter 3 focuses on Kant’s Axioms of Intuition in order to clarify his
notion of magnitude and reconstruct his arguments for the principle of the

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Axioms, which have not been properly understood. It shows that in Kant’s
view, mathematical cognition depends on the representation of magnitudes
and that our apprehension of appearances is directly tied to pure mathematical
cognition. It also reveals a role for intuition in representing magnitudes as
quanta, a role that makes pure mathematical cognition dependent on the
representation of concrete singulars in space and time and directly connects
mathematical cognition to the representation of concrete singular objects
of experience. Chapters 2 and 3 together establish that Kant’s philosophy of
mathematics is grounded in a theory of magnitude, a way of thinking of
mathematics radically different from our own. I next take up Kant’s distinc-
tion between extensive and intensive magnitudes in Chapter 4, and address an
important problem for the former whose resolution points to a role for a
continuous synthesis underlying our representation of continuous magni-
tudes. Chapter 5 then considers more closely the nature of intuitive represen-
tation, and what it means to say that intuition is singular. It reconciles the
singularity of intuition with its role in the representation of a continuous
homogeneous manifold. It then considers Kant’s understanding of the distinc-
tion between concrete and abstract in order to explain the relation between the
singularity of intuition and in concreto representation, and explains the sense
in which quanta and quantitas are relatively abstract concepts whose objects
may nevertheless be concrete.
The chapters of Part I proceed as far as possible through a close reading of
Kant’s texts. Before looking more deeply into Kant’s views, Chapter 6 provides
some historical background to the theory of magnitudes in the Euclidean
mathematical tradition. This interlude begins with an examination of the
Elements without presupposing prior acquaintance with it, briefly discusses
the long Euclidean tradition that followed, and touches on a few of Kant’s
immediate predecessors. While necessarily incomplete and selective, it pro-
vides the backdrop for Kant’s theory of magnitudes.
Part II of the book then explains the foundation of Kant’s theory of
magnitudes and the role of intuition in it. Kant does not simply adopt the
theory of magnitudes inherited from the Euclidean tradition; he deepens and
reworks it in order to explain the possibility of mathematical cognition.
Chapter 7 shows that Kant defines magnitude by appeal to the notion of what
I call “strict” homogeneity, a notion that reflects the limits of conceptual
representation and reveals the need for intuition to represent magnitudes. It
also shows that according to Kant, the categories of quantity allow us to have
cognition of the part–whole relations of magnitudes. In Kant’s view, the part–
whole composition relations of a homogeneous manifold in intuition are a
distinctive and essential feature of mathematical cognition and the mathemat-
ical properties of appearances.
Chapter 8 shows how Kant fundamentally reworks the metaphysics of
quantity found in Leibniz, Wolff, and his followers by introducing a

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distinction between quanta and quantitas and a role for intuition in repre-
senting quanta. Kant thereby transforms both the theory of magnitudes
derived from the Euclidean tradition and the rationalist metaphysics of quan-
tity to ground his theory of mathematical cognition.
The work of the previous chapters reveals that Kant’s account of magni-
tudes is mereological. This leaves a gap between Kant’s mereological account
of magnitudes and the rich mathematical notion of magnitudes found in
Euclid and the Euclidean tradition. Chapter 9 addresses this gap. An analysis
and reconstruction of the assumptions of Euclid’s and Kant’s theories of
magnitude reveals that both presuppose a general theory of pure concrete
measurement. Further analysis reveals that equality plays a pivotal role in
bridging the gap between the mereology and mathematics of magnitudes. It
also provides evidence that Kant was aware of that role. Kant almost certainly
had more to say about the foundations of the general theory of magnitude and
its relation to mathematics and the world, but it is at this point that we reach
the limits of Kant’s explicit theorizing in either published or unpublished texts.
The concluding chapter briefly surveys the results of the inquiry while indi-
cating further work to be done.

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