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Kant on the faculty of apperception
Abstract
Although I begin with a brief look at the idea that as a faculty of mind, apperception must be grounded in some (noumenal) power of the soul, my focus is on claims about the alleged noumenal import of some of Kant’s particular theses about the faculty of apperception: it is inexplicable, immaterial, and can provide evidence that humans are members of the intelligible world (and so possess the noumenal freedom required for morality). I argue that when the claim of inexplicability is placed in the context of Kant’s standards for transcendental psychological explanation, it has no noumenal implications. Similarly, when understood in the context of his views about scientific explanations, Kant’s claim that the faculty of apperception cannot be understood in materialist terms has no important metaphysical payoff. The case of freedom is different, because for a long time, Kant believed that he could establish the freedom required for morality by appealing to the freedom required for thought. In the end, however, he abandoned this hoped for noumenal implication of the faculty of apperception.
... Of course, since the height of anglophone and German Kant scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s, there certainly have been book-length publications that, among other themes, centrally address fundamental issues raised in the Deduction, but not all of them are completely successful in their attempts to grasp the central thrust of Kant's thought or as meticulous as would be required for a thorough understanding of the arguments presented in the Deduction, and none of them have proved influential in successive research (so far at least), Collins (1999) perhaps being the exception-two among them are arguably revisions of already earlier established views, but no less important for that (i.e. Bird 2006;Kitcher 2011). ...
... 4 And of course in France, with Béatrice Longuenesse's undeniably formidable classic Kant et le pouvoir de juger (Longuenesse 1993), arguably not a book specifically dedicated to the Transcendental Deduction, but it nonetheless addresses a central topic of the B-Deduction, namely the role of judgement and figurative synthesis, and how the metaphysical deduction is to be considered as integral to the story of the Deduction (it came out in English translation in 1997). 5 To mention the most important monographs from this period, apart from those already referenced in note 3: Allison (1983; 1996ab), Aquila (1983;), Brook (1994), Carl (1989a1992), Guyer (1987), Kitcher (1990), Klemme (1996), Mohr (1991), Thöle (1991), Waxman (1991), Howell (1992, Longuenesse (1993;1997), and for specialist accounts of the Metaphysical Deduction, Brandt (1991) and Wolff (1995) (see also Grünewald 1986), as well as four essential edited volumes dedicated to the Deduction, Tuschling (1984), Robinson (1986), Blasche et al. (1988) and, in part, Förster (1989. See also the recently compiled essays on the Deduction by Hans Wagner (Wagner 2008ab), of which (2008b) also appeared in Tuschling (1984). ...
... As with the later McDowell (2009;, Pippin, who is not a Kant scholar strictly speaking, is often much more interesting and illuminating than many a Kant scholar in his take on the Deduction. I discuss Pippin's as well as McDowell's views in this regard in detail in Schulting (2016ac;2017a) and Schulting (forthcoming b). 17 See the bibliography for further references. ...
In this paper I provide an overview of the latest research on Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, from the last 20 years or so, including a non-exhaustive bibliography. I also reflect on the question why in that period there has up until now been so little recent book-length work dedicated to the Deduction, on so-called ‘analytical’ approaches to reading Kant and the Deduction in particular, and on the related issue of the relevance of both evaluative and historical/hermeneutical interpretations of the Deduction. In the latter part of the essay, I consider the most important desiderata for systematic-interpretatively guided research into the Deduction.
... Z.B. Kitcher (2014),Kitcher (2017),Wunderlich (2005). ...
This is the abridged penultimate draft of my dissertation. It was published to fulfill a requirement for the PhD degree at Heidelberg University. A complete printed version is forthcoming. Please do not cite or quote this text.
Published in 1785, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is one of the most powerful texts in the history of ethical thought. In this book, Immanuel Kant formulates and justifies a supreme principle of morality that issues universal and unconditional moral commands. These commands receive their normative force from the fact that rational agents autonomously impose the moral law upon themselves. As such, they are laws of freedom. This volume contains the first facing-page German-English edition of Kant's Groundwork. It presents an authentic edition of the German text and a carefully revised version of Mary Gregor's acclaimed English translation, as well as editorial notes and a full bilingual index. It will be the edition of choice for any student or scholar who is not content with reading this central contribution to modern moral philosophy through the veil of English translation.
This book presents the first extensive analysis in English of Kant's systematic criticism of dogmatic accounts of the mind as a distinctive object.
This criticism has been much admired, especially in Anglophone circles, but interpreters have rarely paid attention to its full historical context and the many different dimensions of its treatment of the mind.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant organizes his criticism in terms of four fundamental fallacies or ‘paralogisms’ of ‘rational psychology’, and he discusses these under the heading of four traditional topics: substantiality, simplicity, identity, and ideality of the soul.
A close analysis of Kant's earlier work, including notes from his lectures on metaphysics (most of which have been only recently published in German), demonstrates that Kant's most fundamental views here concern several topics that are not listed as one of the four explicit paralogism headings.
In particular, his views on causality, judgement, and the mind's immateriality, independence (freedom), and immortality have a hidden and central importance.
Throughout his career, Kant's views evolved on these topics, especially in the period of the extensive revisions of the paralogisms for the second ed. of the first Critique, when Kant published his major works on ethics, the Groundwork and the second Critique.
In this period, he also developed his most sophisticated discussions of apperception and transcendental idealism.
The volume outlines and evaluates the history and structure of each of Kant's major arguments in this area, and it comments on their relation to major lines of interpretation and developments in contemporary philosophy.
It concludes that Kant's ultimate position on most doctrines concerning the mind is much closer to rationalism than is generally appreciated, and that this position also maintains, for the most part, a revolutionary critical perspective that remains highly relevant for current discussions.
In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation for a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory.
Although many take the formula of humanity to be Kant’s best formulation of the CI, there is no agreement on his argument for it. Kant says that the argument comes in GMM3, but that section is difficult to interpret. I draw on his remarks about cognizing other minds in the Paralogisms to interpret the argument of sub-section 2 of GMM3, the argument that rational beings must “lend” the idea of freedom to all rational beings. Kant later rejects his attempt to establish the CI in GMM3 and tries again in the fact of reason passages of the
Kant's change of mind, It is one of the unsettling lessons of Kant's critical philosophy that even the most painstaking conceptual analysis does not justify applying the concepts analysed. On a purely analytic level, much can be said about unicorns, bachelors or God, but it is an entirely different question whether there are such fantastic creatures, i.e. whether there is something to which we refer when we avail ourselves of these words in conversation. In philosophy, practical as well as theoretical, this problem is particularly acute when these concepts rest on synthetic judgments a priori. For instance, the analytic sections of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals are intended to convey a precise impression of what morality means. The principle of morality, Kant argues, is stated with due philosophical precision for the first time ever in the history of ethical thought. But to dispel the sceptical concern that morality might not be real he has to embark on quite a different project. He needs to show that morality is more than a nice idea that quick-witted philosophers can analyse to their hearts' content, while in practice it does not, and cannot, determine human action. After all, it is impossible to point to a morally valuable action in experience, even in principle, be it from the third- or the first-person point of view.
Introduction We inherit from Wittgenstein's Blue Book a distinction that Wittgenstein did not take up again in other writings but which subsequently acquired a life of its own: the distinction between use of ‘I’ “as subject” and use of ‘I’ “as object.” It is tempting to connect this distinction with one we inherit from Kant: the distinction between consciousness of oneself “as subject” and consciousness of oneself “as an object.” The connection between the two distinctions has played an important role in many recent analyses of the use of ‘I’ as subject as well as in recent interpretations of Kant's view. I agree that the connection is illuminating. Nevertheless, I will argue that the two distinctions do not exactly map. There is no question that the proposition “I think,” which, in Kant's analysis, is an expression of consciousness of oneself as subject, is, in the terms of the Blue Book and those of later analyses inspired by it, an instance of the use of ‘I’ as subject. But the converse is not true. Most of the examples of use of ‘I’ as subject we find both in the Blue Book and in subsequent literature are, in Kant's terms, expressions of consciousness of oneself as an object. Explaining why this is so helps bring to light the existence of two quite different uses of ‘I’ as subject. Both meet the criterion of “immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun” by which Shoemaker, taking his inspiration from Wittgenstein's explanations in the Bue Book, defined the use of ‘I’ as subject. But they meet it for quite different reasons. Or so I shall argue.
The book presents Kant's theory of the cognitive subject. It begins by setting the stage for his discussions of the unity and power of 'apperception' by presenting the attempts of his predecessors to explain the nature of the self and of self-consciousness, and the relation between self-consciousness and object cognition. The central chapters lay out the structure of the transcendental deduction, the argument from cognition to the necessary unity of apperception, and the relations among his theories of the unity and power of apperception, the 'psychological ideal,' and the 'noumenal' self. Later chapters draw on this material to offer a more precise account of his criticism that the Rational Psychologists failed to understand the unique character of the representation 'I-think' and to defend Kant against the charges that his theory of cognition and apperception is inconsistent or psychologistic. The concluding chapters present Kantian alternatives to recent theories of the activities of the self in cognition and moral action, the self-ascription of belief, knowledge of other minds, the appropriate explananda for theories of consciousness, and the efficacy of 'transcendental' arguments.
Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is one of the most difficult but also most important of Kant's works. Published in 1786 between the first (1781) and second (1787) editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Metaphysical Foundations occupies a central place in the development of Kant's philosophy, but has so far attracted relatively little attention compared with other works of Kant's critical period. Michael Friedman's book develops a new and complete reading of this work and reconstructs Kant's main argument clearly and in great detail, explaining its relationship to both Newton's Principia and eighteenth-century scientific thinkers such as Euler and Lambert. By situating Kant's text relative to his pre-critical writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy and, in particular, to the changes Kant made in the second edition of the Critique, Friedman articulates a radically new perspective on the meaning and development of the critical philosophy as a whole.
This is a book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context. Specifically, Eric Watkins argues that a grasp of Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian thought in eighteenth-century Germany helps one to see how the critical Kant argued for causal principles that have both metaphysical and epistemological elements. On this reading Kant's model of causality does not consist of events, but rather of substances endowed with causal powers that are exercised according to their natures and circumstances. This innovative conception of Kant's view of causality casts a light on Kant's philosophical beliefs in general, such as his account of temporality, his explanation of the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, and his response to the skeptical arguments of Hume.
EXPERIENCE is something of which we are conscious. It is the first result of our comprehension, but it is not the limit of our understanding, since it stimulates our faculty of reason, but does not satisfy its desire for knowledge. While all our knowledge may begin with sensible impressions or experience there is an element in it which does not rise from this source, but transcends it. That knowledge is transcendental which is occupied not so much with mere outward objects as with our manner of knowing those objects, that is to say, with a priori concepts of them. All our knowledge is either a priori or a posteriori. That is a posteriori knowledge which is derived from sensible experience as including sensible impressions or states; while a priori knowledge is that which is not thus gained, but consists of whatever is universal or necessary. A complete Transcendental Philosophy would be a systematic exposition of all that is a priori in human knowledge, or of 'all the principles of pure reason.' But a Critique of Pure Reason cannot include all this. It can do little more than deal with the synthetic element or quality in a priori knowledge, as distinguished from the analytic elements. We perceive objects through our sensibility which furnishes us, as our faculty of receptivity, with those intuitions that become translated into thought by means of the understanding. This is the origin of our conceptions, or ideas. I denominate as matter that which in a phenomenon corresponds to sensation; while I call form that quality of matter which presents it in a perceived order. Only matter is presented to our minds a posteriori; as to form, this must inevitably exist in the mind a priori, and therefore it can be considered apart from all sensation.
Neue Auflage hin und wieder vermehret
Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's work: the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit.
Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism
2. Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning
3. Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism
4. What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any?
5. A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing
6. Objectivity and the Normative Fine Structure of Rationality
Notes
Index
Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation ' Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed.
--J'rgen Habermas
The Poverty of Conceptual Truth
- Anderson
- R Lanier
Kant’s First Drafts of the Deduction of the Categories’
- Wolfgang Carl
Edited by the Koeniglichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols
- Immanuel Kant
- Akademie Kants Gesammelte Schriften
- Ausgabe
Against The New Kant: How the Idea of a Critique of Reason Rules Out Rationalist Interpretations
- James Kreines
Critique of Pure Reason: Unified Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett
- Werner Pluhar
- Kant
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant
- Karl Ameriks
- Steve Naragon
Notes and Fragments. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant
- Curtis Bowman
- Paul Guyer
- Fred Rauscher
- Kant
Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works ofImmanuel Kant
- Mary Gregor
- Kant
The Critical and “Empty” Representation “I think”’. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide
- Patricia Kitcher
Reversal or Retreat? Kant’s Deductions of freedom and morality’. In Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: A Critical Guide
- Jens Timmerman
Vernünftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen
- Christian Wolff