This assignment covers the first half of Kant’s part 2, where he discusses the possibility of what he calls “pure natural science.” The heart of the assignment is the set of tables in §21. The preceding sections introduce ideas appearing in these tables and the sections following them discuss the tables.
• The key idea in §§14-20 is Kant’s distinction between “judgments of perception” and “judgments of experience.” He uses this distinction to explain the idea of a priori (or pure) concepts of the understanding, which are listed in the second of Kant’s three tables.
• Kant’s tables in §21 begin with a table of logical forms of statements. Here “categorical” refers to simple subject-predicate sentences, “hypothetical” to if-then sentences, and “disjunctive” to either-or sentences; and it is the sub-table including these ideas that is most important. His second table consists of concepts corresponding to the forms of judgment in the way he has discussed in earlier sections, and the third consists of labels for kinds of synthetic a priori judgments associated with the concepts in the second table.
• The first two sections following the tables, §§21a-22, have something in general to say about the first two tables. In the rest of the assignment, §§23-26, Kant discusses the third table and will attach some content to the labels appearing in it.