ABSTRACT
The process of concept formation had long been understood as proceeding on basis of self-reflection. Nevertheless, they do not form a closed system, as they are typically made to do with the modern subject and its mastering grasp of a universe through its own transcendental perspective. As generally read, Kant's Transcendental Analytic grounds reflection on finite human self rather than leveraging it from transcendent being or the infinite. Human reason gives itself its own foundations in the form of its transcendental principles of knowing-the a priori intuitions of space and time and the pure categories of the understanding discovered by means of transcendental reflection and demonstrated by transcendental deduction. Kant, at the fountainhead of Enlightenment philosophy, does nevertheless recognize the unknowable thing-in-itself as an absolute beyond human ken. Human reflection now manufactures its own transcendental ground and is not beholden to any other. It consists in a constructive building of knowledge on the foundations that human self-reflection fabricates for itself.
