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RÖDL, Sebastian. Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect. Translated by Sibylle Salewski. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. 218pp. Cloth, $39.95-Categories of the Temporal is both a logical investigation and a resolute attack on empiricism. Rödl lets us see the extent to which analytic philosophy has been hampered by an entrenched alliance between empiricism and an understanding of logic that takes inferential logic to be self-standing. Logically elementary aspects of thought-with which we are all familiar as thinkers-cannot be represented within the inferentialist scheme and thus tend to be mistakenly regarded as matters playing out within the logical subject.
When we take logic to be a prerequisite for the study of philosophy, the logic we have in mind investigates the inferential relations between thoughts (or statements or judgments). Rödl is concerned with logic in a broader sense: the study of the form of thought as such. He argues convincingly that the general form of thought, if it is to be thought of anything (of objects, of intuitions), is necessarily a temporal logic and that inferential logic, whether or not it can admit this to itself, necessarily presupposes a logic that is temporal. Rödl thus inverts the...