| Sumario: | In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant presents a transcendental and a metaphysical exposition of time and space as pure intuitions and as forms of sensibility. In a later chapter he presents a metaphysical and a transcendental deduction of a priori pure original concepts. According to Kant the metaphysical exposition "contains that which exhibits the concept as given a priori". I will give a short account of Kant's arguments regarding the metaphysical deduction, underlining some key points. Firstly, Kant needs a principle to establish the table of such concepts and uses, for this purpose, transcendental logic, mainly the functions of unity in judgment. From here he states the table of categories. Kant makes four observations about the correlation between the two tables, of judgments and of categories, and three observations about the table of categories. I will address some issues concerning the "metaphysical deduction": the completeness of the table of the functions of unity as the guideline for the table of categories is debatable and the "deduction" may seem a circular argument. The correlation principle between the functions of unity and categories is not mentioned, but on the third observation on the table of categories Kant implies that it is, more or less, self-evident; further, I will argue that the correlations in the first class, that of quantity, could be different. One can consider that metaphysical deduction is a necessary proof, but it is not enough; at this point categories don't have a proven objective validity. This, I think, is the task of the transcendental deduction; in the end I will address Ewing's claim that the order of the two deductions should be reversed. I find that the metaphysical deduction discovers the categories, and the transcendental deduction establishes their objective validity, therefore the term "deduction" has two meanings for Kant.
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