A method or a tool? On Kant’s notion of transcendental reflection and its connection to the methodology of the first Critique

The method of Kant's transcendental philosophy has been debated ever since the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although this method can often be found referred to as transcendental reflection, the connection to Kant's own understanding of that term is often overlooked or ignored, thus threatening to render the specific operations of transcendental methodology vague. In this paper, I provide an explication of a central tool of transcendental methodology by presenting a reconstruction of Kant's own notion of 'transcendental reflection'.
     I do this in two steps. In a first step, I argue that Kant does in fact use the notion of transcendental reflection in a methodological sense by distinguishing a first-order and a higher-order use of the concept in the only place Kant develops it in the first Critique (namely the Appendix: On the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection through the confusion of the empirical use of the understanding with the transcendental). Secondly, I situate this methodological sense in Kant's broader considerations on method in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method by focusing on transcendental reflection as a necessary precondition for the synthetic method of philosophy. Thus, I conclude, transcendental reflection is not to be used as a placeholder for the transcendental method in general but is rather to be understood as a key term within transcendental methodology itself.

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