The role of intuition in Kant's conceptualization of causality and purposiveness

The subject of this study is the role of intuition in Kant's conceptualization of causality and purposiveness. In Chapter 1, I interpret Kant's Copernican revolution as a strategy to reverse cognitive procedure, not from object to cognition, but from cognition to object. So Kant starts from the products of human reason, such as mathematics and sciences. Kant bases the foundation of knowledge on an inferential procedure open to all cognizers. Intuition plays a pivotal role in such a procedure.;In Chapter 2, I examine how intuitions function in mathematical and scientific inferences as well as in cognition in general. Intuitions and concepts in mathematics are the paradigm of concepts and intuitions in other kinds of cognition. In natural sciences, intuitions are concentrated on a homogeneous quality that scientific concepts postulate. Scientific inferences having these intuitions as the base of computability can be uniformly performed by all cognizers. Ordinary concepts can be considered as exhibited in the intuitions that belong to diverse but respectively homogeneous qualities. All of us have an inferential ability to achieve universally valid judgments acknowledged and recognized by each other. I understand this ability of inferential universality as the essence of Kant's transcendental idealism about cognitive subject and I call it cognitive machinery.;Chapter 3 further investigates the role of intuition in the application of concepts to intuitions. Kant introduces schema as a medium between intuitions and concepts and focuses on the schemata of pure concepts, suggesting that the transcendental schema is a procedure by which pure concepts apply to intuitions. Kant has emphasized inner sense and I complement his seemingly internal account by stressing the role of homogeneous intuitions, in the guise of domesticated intuitions, in schematic procedures. The normativity of inference derives from normative indifference of steps, based on cognitive indifference that exploits homogeneous and domesticated intuitions.;Chapter 4 examines the concept of causality in relation to intuitions. Causality is a concept of relation; while cause is a power to produce its effect. I understand causality as a relation between two series of events or occurrences that are quantitatively synchronizable covariant, which can be tested and modified through empirical intuitions.;The fifth and last chapter examines the concept of purposiveness in relation to mechanical causality. Unlike transcendental causality that is a constitutive principle of cognition, purposiveness is only a regulative principle for the power of judgment. Mechanical causality is a kind of causality through the mechanism of nature. It cannot adequately explain organized beings as we judge them. Then Kant envisages an intentional causality; with its constitutive character deprived, we have the concept of purposiveness. Intuition underlies such a conceptualization of purposiveness in contrast with mechanical causality. A mechanical cause can be given in intuition since we can locate it in a time-series powered by fundamental forces. But purposiveness cannot be given in intuition in Kant's times. Thus Kant asserts that organized beings as natural ends are inexplicable by mechanical causes alone and introduces the purposiveness into our account of organized beings.