This chapter examines an important but underappreciated episode in the history of the concept of concept, namely, its developments in the School of Brentano and early phenomenology. It discusses Brentano and his first students – Marty, Stumpf, Meinong, Twardowski and Husserl – as well as the students of these students, including those of Marty, such as Brod and Weltsch, and followers of Husserl, such as Pöll, Reinach and Stein. The chapter shows that these authors developed strongly systematic views about concepts, first by thoroughly exploring questions about the ontology, structure, semantics and acquisition of concepts, and second by showing how theoretical choices in one domain influence those in others. Their systematic approach is particularly well-developed in a central distinction in their theory of concepts, among ordinary concepts, scientific concepts and – for Husserl and his students – ‘pure’ concepts.

Chapter 6 seeks to establish that Kant’s account of the schematism of the pure understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason yields the same result as the transcendental deduction, but does so by approaching the question concerning the legitimate use of categories from the angle of time qua pure form of intuition. On my reading, Kant conceives of transcendental schemata and categories as different instances of the a priori rules that determine how the mind can unify a manifold at all. Since transcendental schemata present these rules as ways of unifying successive representations, they can be said to constitute the sensible condition of any a priori cognition of objects. I take Kant to argue that Wolffian metaphysics ought to use categories independently of this condition in order to establish itself as a purely intellectual discipline and, hence, that a priori judgments about the soul or God do not amount to cognitions of objects.