Kant, Husserl, and analyticity

This study concerns the nature and role of analyticity in the work of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. Its initial goal is that of clarifying the place of analytic judgment in Kant's critical project. Against the widely held assumption that analytic judgment has no role to play in the critical project, I show that analytic judgment has a precise and genuinely important role to play in the context of Kant's metaphysics. Analytic judgment has the role of clarifying our a priori conceptual repertoire and thus of making possible the synthetic a priori judgments that are properly constitutive of metaphysics. The next goal of the study is that of unifying and defending Kant's various characterizations of analytic judgment. Whereas a number of commentators have suggested that Kant is vague or ambivalent as regards the properties of analytic judgment, I show that we can extract a clear, consistent picture of analytic judgment from his work. The key to seeing this, I argue, is becoming clear on Kant's basic assumptions concerning concepts, logic, and propositional form. Subsequently, I turn to Husserl. Picking up on the fact that for Husserl, too, analyticity has metaphysical, or ontological significance, I spell out his conception of analyticity in detail. I show that analyticity for Husserl embraces two essentially symmetrical domains of law: the a priori laws of objective givenness and the a priori laws of propositional form. I then bring Husserl and Kant together. After showing that Husserl fails to capture the essence of Kant's theory of analytic judgment, and so fails to see exactly where he stands relative to Kant, I argue that what ultimately distinguishes Husserl from Kant is the claim that analytic truth is properly articulated in a purely formal context. I show that this departure from Kant has extremely significant consequences. For example, it enables Husserl to describe whole systems of judgment, such as mathematics or logic, as analytic; and it enables Husserl to defend the possibility of analytic judgments having empirical content.