Search Results

In this chapter the background materials from the Empiricists, the Rationalists, and Kant’s earlier work, and the interpretations of the structure of the transcendental deduction and of the crucial notion of ‘synthesis’ are brought together in an account of the argument that the ‘unity of apperception’ is a necessary condition for rational cognition. The chapter explains in more detail what Kant understands by ‘rational cognition’ and it clarifies his various formulations of the ‘principle of apperception.’ It also shows how the theory of apperception fits into the deduction of the legitimacy of the categories and it considers the relations between transcendental and empirical apperception.

Kant introduces ‘apperception’ both as a principle that is presupposed in cognition and as a power or faculty that creates cognition. This chapter focuses on the power/faculty of apperception and shows its relation to other notions of the self that appear in Kant’s philosophy, including his theory of the ‘psychological ideal’ and his references to a ‘noumenal’ self. It also contrasts the analysis of the argument for apperception presented in Chapter 9 with two same-sounding accounts, those of Henry Allison and Eric Watkins.

This chapter offers an apologetic interpretation of the most basic features of Kant's central doctrine of apperception, and argues that this doctrine reveals that Kant's view of the self is in fact largely the opposite of the so-called Cartesian subjectivism that has been so often ascribed to him. For Kant, the subject of apperception is ‘non-Cartesian’ in key epistemological as well as ontological senses: its determinate knowledge of itself, as of all other things, depends basically on spatial intuition, and it has no theoretically demonstrable existence as a pure spirit. The project of clarifying Kant's position in this way has much more than a merely exegetical significance, for it also reveals that his ultimate Critical doctrine of the self remains in many ways as worthy of consideration as the best contemporary theories.

This chapter identifies ‘speculative’ elements Hegel claims to discover in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, elements he believes Kant himself failed to appreciate. That is, Hegel discovers resources in the Transcendental Deduction for overcoming the heterogeneity of concept and intuition. In his view, the idea of identity is, for example, implicit in Kant’s conception of the faculty of the original synthetic unity of apperception. This chapter provides further evidence that the identity Hegel claims to discover in the Transcendental Deduction is achieved neither by a reduction of concepts to intuitions, nor by a reduction of intuitions to concepts. The lesson Hegel believes we should ultimately derive from the Transcendental Deduction is that we need a new and non-Kantian account of the nature and origin of conceptual form.

Self‐determining actors must be able to know what reasons they have. They must be able to audit those reasons, to assess whether they have warrant for a particular response. Chapter 5 defines warrant and discusses its structure, distinguishing it from justification and knowledge. It argues that if self‐determination is possible reason relations must be a priori.

This chapter addresses three questions about the doctrine of ‘inner sense’ that Kant adapted from Locke: Why did he originally believe that a Lockean inner sense was crucial for a theory of rational cognition? Why did he then demote ‘inner sense’ in the Critique and introduce ‘transcendental apperception’ as the key faculty in cognition? How do recent criticisms of inner sense theories affect Kant’s residual uses of the notion?

This chapter explains some of the puzzles about self-consciousness that bedeviled Locke, Leibniz, and Kant’s less well-known predecessors, Wolff, Crusius, and Merian. It presents Leibniz’s unusual theory of apperception. It also looks at several episodes in the lively debate about the priority of self-consciousness versus object cognition that seems to stand behind Kant’s unusual claim that self-consciousness and object cognition are necessary and sufficient conditions for each other.

This chapter looks at a set of unpublished notes that contain Kant’s first systematic discussion of ‘apperception’ in relation to the requirements of cognition. One interpretive controversy surrounding the notes is whether the ‘apperception’ they discuss is ‘substantial’ (the view of Wolfgang Carl), ‘empirical’ (the view of Paul Guyer), or something else. By considering the materials that Kant had available at the time of these notes (around 1775), we can appreciate the breakthrough that enabled him finally to produce a transcendental deduction centered on the notion of ‘apperception’ half a decade later, viz. the recognition that the representation ‘I-think’ has no content of its own.

A certain group of concepts hang together as ingredients in our understanding of ourselves and others as persons: apperception, grasp of reasons, self‐determination, will and freedom. They are surveyed in this chapter.

This chapter examines Kant’s theory of the unity of apperception and the argument he offers for it in the transcendental deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason. His theory is that the unity of apperception is created through the conscious synthesizing of materials in rational cognitions. Those conscious acts create and grasp the necessary connection of mental states in a single ‘I’. Because the unity of apperception is a necessary condition for rational cognition, his ‘transcendental argument’ for it is unique to that case. The special features of his argument are shown by comparing his case for mental unity with that offered recently by Quassim Cassam. Kant’s theory of necessary for cognition conscious synthesizing also suggests difficulties for current theories of consciousness.

Leibniz gives the most original and complex account of personal identity from an immaterialist point of view. This chapter analyses and evaluates Leibniz's account and the ways in which it was taken up and developed by the leading metaphysician in eighteenth-century Germany, Christian Wolff. The chapter begins with an account of the development of Leibniz's thought on individuation and identity in general and then turns to Leibniz's account of personal identity. There are some similarities between Leibniz's and Locke's accounts, but the differences are, in the last analysis, more significant than the similarities. Whereas Locke argues for keeping personal and substantial identity separate, Leibniz maintains that the (personal) identity required for morality can be preserved only by the metaphysical identity of the self as immaterial soul. Yet, unlike some immaterialists, Leibniz argues that the identity of the soul, as substance (metaphysical identity), is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the identity of the self as person (moral identity). The problem in Leibniz's account lies mainly in his failure to provide a clear account of the notion of relating to one's own self. The chapter examines various possible reading of Leibnizian consciousness or apperception and concludes that it is a higher order account of consciousness. The main focus of the chapter's discussion of Wolff is the latter's notion of consciousness. Like the anonymous author of the Essay on Consciousness, discussed in chapter 8, but arrived at independently, Wolff is arguing for a mutual dependence of the consciousness of objects and self-consciousness. He constructs the possibility of both self-consciousness and the consciousness of objects in terms of the mental act of distinguishing. In terms of Personal identity Wolff largely follows Leibniz, but emphasises that it is consciousness of our own diachronic identity that makes us a person.

There was a long and lively debate about of Wolff’s account of consciousness and self-consciousness in the eighteenth century; and in this context, non-Wolffian views about personal identity were advanced, even if not always explicitly, as part of the critiques of Leibniz and Wolff. The main focus of this chapter is the issue of consciousness and self-consciousness. The chapter begins with an examination of a debate about the relationship between followers and critics of Wolff concerning consciousness and the act of distinguishing. Critics such as Rüdiger and Crusius argue against Wolff that the act of distinguishing presupposes consciousness, and so the latter cannot depend on the former. Defenders of Wolff, such as Klosse, argue that even having any sensation or feeling involves distinguishing it from previous perceptions. Hollmann holds that we have no direct consciousness of either the self or objects, rather we are immediately conscious only of representations, while von Creuz hints at the notion of a self-consciousness that is independent of the consciousness of objects and the act of distinguishing. The most important critics of Wolff are Johann Georg Sulzer and Jean Bernard Mérian, discussed in detail in this chapter. Sulzer introduces, contra Wolff, a fundamental distinction between two basic mental powers: representing (object-directed) and feeling (subject-directed). He undermines his own distinction, however, by adopting an essentially Wolffian notion of consciousness. On the positive side and more strongly than other thinkers of the time, Sulzer links self-consciousness to our physical existence. Mérian develops his critique of Wolff differently, arguing that self-consciousness is absolutely fundamental: it is an immediate or “original” apperception that is necessary to all thought as such. This idea of an original self-consciousness as a necessary condition of all thought sounds rather Kantian. Nevertheless, there are several crucial differences between Kant’s and Mérian’s accounts.

This chapter argues that the key explanatory notion in Immanuel Kant's general cognitive semantics is his epigenetic or generative/productive theory of the mind, according to which object-directed representations — including intuitions, concepts, schemata of the imagination, and, most centrally, judgements — are created by the rule-guided application of our innate capacities for spontaneous synthesis to raw sensory intake under the original synthetic unity of apperception. This chapter explores the precise conditions under which all cognitive meaning creation is possible. Broadly speaking, these conditions split into two types: formal or logical conditions and material conditions, or conditions specially relevant to the objective validity. The topic of objective validity leads directly to a discussion of what is clearly the explanatory foundation of all objective mental representations or meanings for Kant: transcendental idealism.

This chapter concerns human freedom, a topic that Kant remarkably struck from the list of main topics in rational psychology, although right before the Critique, he had given it pride of place. Hence, it is crucial to see why the Critique neither presents nor directly criticizes the rationalist arguments for our freedom with which Kant was extremely familiar. Kant's views here must be understood in terms of clues from his lectures, and especially in the light of the different kinds of arguments to freedom, which he presents in his Groundwork (a ‘deduction’) and second Critique (a ‘fact of reason’). I connect the changes in his presentation there with the clearer expression, in the second ed. of the first Critique, of his anti‐rationalist doctrine of self‐knowledge (as dependent on knowing spatial things). In this way, I show how—to appreciate the full interconnection and development of Kant's theoretical and practical views on freedom—we need to go beyond readings by Beck, Paton, Henrich, and others.