ABSTRACT
The chapter considers Kant’s psychologistic account of how the mind produces objective transcendental space and time. His challenge was to explain how two such radically heterogeneous kinds of conscious representation—Chapter 7’s pure concepts of the understanding, which are 100% logical and 0% sensible, and Chapter 8’s purely aesthetic space and time, which are 100% sensible and 0% logical—can be combined at all, much less synthesized to yield objective transcendental space and time. The key to surmounting the challenge is the operation Kant termed transcendental synthesis. To clarify its result, transcendental space is analogized to the Facebook-like network that results when graph theory is used to illustrate what Einstein called “spooky action a distance.” The upshot is that the role of pure concepts of the understanding in transcendental synthesis can be most easily and concisely understood as close transcendental kin to graph theory. Subjects/authors discussed include geometry, arithmetic (number), functions, algebra, mathematical logic, electromagnetism, relativity theory, quantum theory, space, time, spacetime, objectivity, platonism, language, cognitive evolution, self-consciousness, Vlatko Verdral, David Deutsch, and Fotini Markopoulou.
