Kant's transcendental methodology: An essay on justification, objectivity, and subjectivity in Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories

I argue for a new interpretation of Kant's methodology in his transcendental deduction. I focus on Kant's idea that the self-knowledge of our finite cognitive subject can justify our metaphysical knowledge of empirical objects. My primary contribution to the literature is to distinguish two kinds of self-knowledge in Kant, which I do by pulling apart two strands in his thinking on our subjectivity. On one hand, there are Kant's merely subjectivist doctrines of how we cannot help but think, and of how things cannot but appear to us. On the other hand, there is Kant's methodology. This includes his transcendental method—which is to ask, “What is it for our cognitive faculty to be finite?”—and his methodological idealism, according to which the answers to the questions, “What is it to be a finite cognitive subject?“ and “What is it to be an empirical object?” come together.