The Role of Wolff’s Analysis of Judgements in Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation

The subject and its cognitive faculties play a prominent role in the German philosophy and logic of the eighteenth century, including Wolff and Kant. This is due to the central place they granted to the notion of judgement. Ignoring the details, they considered a judgement to be made when two concepts or representations are united in thought. This aspect, already present in Wolff, comes more to the fore in the philosophy of Kant. Nevertheless, both also adopted a more formal approach to judgements. This chapter shows how both Wolff and Kant seek to combine the epistemological role of the subject with a formal analysis of the notion of judgement. As a result, I defend the claim that the criticism of metaphysics Kant elaborates in his dissertation De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis of 1770 relies on a transformation of this formal analysis to the meta-level of the human faculties.