Judgment as Synthesis

The review essay discusses Wayne Martin’s Theories of Judgment, which claims that theories of judgment confront the difficulty that its object belongs to three distinct sciences: logic, psychology, and phenomenology. The essay denies that there is such a thing as a phenomenology of judgment, as judgment is not an object of experience, but an act of spontaneity. Moreover, it suggests a more radical reading of Kant than the one proposed by Martin: Kant was right to identify the unity of the content of judgment with the force of judgment, which entails that the subject matter of logic, insofar as it treats of relations of contents of judgment, and psychology, insofar as it treats of acts of judgment, is the same.