Abstract

This chapter explores Kant’s appeals to epistemological conceptions of the analytic and the synthetic in his unpublished _Reflexionen_ of the late 1760s. That conception of analyticity proves to be vulnerable to the “recuperation strategy” discussed in Chapter 6, just as the essentially methodological conception treated there. This fact explains Kant’s own worries about such a problem in a pair of famous _Reflexionen_ discussed by Lewis White Beck, which concern whether synthetic judgments can be “made analytic.” The chapter then shows the important role of a genuinely logical conception of the analytic/synthetic distinction within Kant’s nascent understanding of his new critical project, as expressed in the famous 1772 letter to Marcus Herz announcing the critical philosophy and in related contemporaneous notes.