Abstract

In his Kant on Laws, Eric Watkins presents an account of reason on which the principles of specification and continuity are regulative instructions to search for different kinds of the unconditioned. I suggest that we correct Watkins’ account in two ways. First, we need to complete Watkins’ claim to the plurality of the unconditioned: reason aims for three kinds of the unconditioned, associated with the lowest, next and highest concepts. Second, we need to look beyond reason’s search for the unconditioned in order to properly understand the nature of the aim of reason. I argue that we construe reason’s aim as the systematic unity of cognition considered as a whole or, in Kant’s teleological terms, as the realization of an ‘idea’, or a ‘purposive unity’.