Kant: Rational Psychology

This paper takes issue with the widespread view that Kant rejects epistemic phenomenalism. According to epistemic phenomenalism, only cognition of states of one’s own mind can be certain, while cognition of outer objects is necessarily uncertain. I argue that Kant does not reject this view, but accepts a modified version of it. For, in contrast to traditional skeptics, he distinguishes between two kinds of outer objects and holds that we have direct access to outer appearances in our mind; but he (...) still considers objects outside our mind unknowable. This sheds new light on Kant’s refutation of idealism. (shrink)

As Pierre Kerszberg retraces Kant’s critical account of the human being’s confounded, if not tortured, attempts to grasp totality, the reader may occasionally lose sight of the general objectives of the book. In fact, my main criticism of the book concerns Kerszberg’s somewhat cavalier approach to presenting a clear structure of thought. Yet, regardless of the occasional confusion, Critique and Totality is rich with insight and fresh historical perspectives.

Since the classic works by Castañeda, Perry and Lewis, de se thoughts have been described as thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’. In recent years, various theoretical perspectives have gained ground, and even if the transcendental system does not seem to contemplate an explicit articulation of de se thoughts, apparently a few features of transcendental apperception and I think do anticipate a few points in Perry and Recanati’s claims on the so-called implicit de se thoughts in the specific terms of Transcendentalism.

In the Paralogisms of Pure Reason Kant casts a critical glance at that doctrine of the soul which was called "rational psychology" by the classical metaphysics of his time, and which can best be understood as a systematic reconstruction of Descartes' theory of mind. Kant agrees with the proponents of rational psychology that our representation of a subject of experience is necessarily the representation of a simple, unitary and persisting subject. But Kant's decisive objection to his opponents is that from (...) these necessary truths about how a subject must represent itself no conclusions about the ontological constitution of the subject in itself can be derived. Despite the brilliance and profundity of his criticism, however, Kant himself remains, in a certain sense, trapped in the methodological solipsism of his predecessors. (shrink)

At the end of the chapter on paralogisms in the first edition of his _Critique of Pure Reason, Kant treats the problem of the transcendental illusion in a very detailed way which is not exceeded in the second edition. The essay gives an exhaustive commentary to this passage leading to the result that the unavoidability of transcendental illusion has to be taken seriously in that sense that human reason in his theoretical use cannot conceived other than liable to illusion.

: It is the aim of the following considerations to use Kantian epistemology to advance the current debate about the relation between mind and brain. First of all the naturalistic assumption that all mental phenomena are based on neuronal processes is called into question. Secondly it is shown that naturalism leads necessarily to an absurd constructivism that is very similar to Kant’s transcendental position, but which conflicts with naturalism’s empirical premise. In spite of the progress in brain research Kant’s transcendental (...) approach is still a promising attempt to treat philosophical problems, especially the problem about the relation between mind, brain and world. (shrink)

[1] Experience is a real concrete phenomenon. The existence of experience entails the existence of a subject of experience. Therefore subjects of experience are concretely real. [2] The existence of a subject of experience in the lived present or living moment of experience, e.g. the period of time in which the grasping of a thought occurs, provably involves the existence of singleness or unity of an unsurpassably strong kind. The singleness or unity in question is a metaphysically real, concrete entity. (...) So if thoughts, or any experiences at all, really do occur or exist – and they do – then there exist entities that are genuine, concrete, metaphysical unities of an unsurpassable sort. [3] There is a metaphysically irreproachable sense in which we may – must – take these unsurpassable metaphysical unities to be themselves subjects of experience, although we may also take them to be thoughts or experiences. If so, there is a sound argument to the conclusion of the 2nd Paralogism. [4] Perhaps and are not in the final analysis distinct. Perhaps Kant is right, in his 1772 letter to Herz, that ‘the thinking or the existence of the thought and the existence of my own self are one and the same’. (shrink)

One of the perennially intriguing questions regarding Kant’s approach to the human sciences is the relation between his ‘transcendental psychology’ and empirical cognitive psychology. In this paper I compare his analysis of the a priori conditions of human cognition in the Critique of pure reason with his empirical account of the human cognitive faculties in his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. In comparing his approach to self-consciousness, sensibility, imagination, and understanding in these two works, I argue that Kant (...) distinguishes between the transcendental and empirical aspects of the human cognitive faculties, and regards the transcendental functions as configuring the empirical faculties of human consciousness, or as giving them the structure that they require to become faculties of cognition. I then show that the cognitive faculties of human beings may vary in their empirical operation, even while they are configured by the same transcendental structure. Finally, I characterize Kant’s transcendental psychology in the first Critique as an account of the faculties that are required for a mind to be an agent or subject of cognition, corresponding to his account of the conditions that are required universally and necessarily for something to be an object of cognition.Keywords: Immanuel Kant; Anthropology; Psychology; Cognition; Transcendental; Empirical. (shrink)

In this paper, the thematic context for Fichte’s early concern with the character of the forms of intuition, and specifically inner intuition, is adumbrated. This context is provided by means of a brief exposition of Kant’s doctrine of time as the form of inner sense, and its dual role; its positive role in the “order of cognition” or ordo cognoscendi, and its negative role in the critique of Seelenlehre or “doctrine of the soul.” It is then argued, on this basis, (...) that Fichte’s critique of Kant’s doctrine can serve as a principle for our understanding both of the context for, and the content of, Fichte’s early, propaedeutic writings, and thus of the character of the development of post-Kantian theoretical philosophy and doctrine of knowledge. The paper develops in three parts; through an introduction, in which the importance of the theme to the development of German idealism is intimated, to an exposition of the basic theses of Kant’s Sinnenlehre in the Critique of Pure Reason, and to a summary of Fichte’s critique thereof, as this is set out in the Grundriss. (shrink)

Keller (Univ. of California, Riverside) offers an original reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that combines thematic focus and comprehensive scope." Choice \n\nBook Description\n\nIn Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness, Pierre Keller examines\nKant's theory of self-consciousness and argues that it succeeds in\nexplaining how both subjective and objective experience are possible.\nPrevious interpretations of Kant's theory have held that he treats\nall self-consciousness as knowledge of objective states of affairs,\nand also that self-consciousness can be interpreted as knowledge\nof personal identity. By developing this (...) striking new interpretation\nKeller is able to argue that transcendental self-consciousness underwrites\na general theory of objectivity and subjectivity at the same time.\n. (shrink)

In recent philosophy there has been increasing interest in the relation between the first and third person perspective on experience. The first person perspective has a certain epistemic priority with regard to the ascription of inner states. An agent knows his or her beliefs and desires in a way which no one else can. There is thus a presumption in favor of the agent’s self-ascriptions when it comes to the ascription of inner states. This first person authority over such inner (...) states as sensations, beliefs, and desires is an important part of what makes us think of those states as inner. We think of inner states as belonging to an individual in a way which distinguishes those states from physical states of the same individual. Inner states are constitutive of each of our own distinctive perspectives on outer states. They are the distinctive way things appear to each of us. By contrast, physical or outer states are accessible to all of us in pretty much the same way. Outer states are presented to us by way of inner states. But we think of outer states as outer precisely because we think of them as external to our own distinctive perspective. (shrink)

This work makes the revisionist claim that "the theory of mind in the Critique [of Pure Reason] is much more traditional and rationalistic than it at first appears, but that it is also more defensible than is generally recognized". Specifically, Ameriks aims to show that "Kant can be seen as wanting, above all else, to put... into a respectable form" the "core of the rationalist commitment" "to the idea that we have a special kind of identity that can withstand all (...) the kinds of change that ordinarily spell the end of ordinary objects". But, first, Ameriks's account of the "core of the rationalist commitment" is maddeningly vague and unstable--indeed, Ameriks's conception of rationalism is so ill-defined that at one point skepticism about the external world is treated as a part of rationalism rather than as the very much undesired consequence of certain Cartesian premises which Kant thought it to be!--and the discussion is damagingly ahistorical. Ameriks does emphasize the developmental dimension within Kant's own work, ranging over the whole of Kant's published corpus and mining the various lecture courses on metaphysics which have now been gathered together as volume 28 of the Berlin edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. But his picture of rationalism itself and its characteristic arguments is undifferentiated and undocumented, and this leads to the misconception that Kant thought that some theoretical defense of rationalist theses could still be maintained while what are merely some possible arguments in their behalf were criticized; but some review of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Meier would surely have shown that Kant was criticizing all of the chief arguments for the rationalist conception of the soul known to him, and attention to Kant's own claim for the completeness of his presentation of these natural and inevitable illusions of human reason could have suggested only that Kant himself thought that these were all the theoretical arguments for a rationalist philosophy of mind there could be. Second, it is questionable whether Ameriks's view really revises our standard reading of Kant's conclusions at all. The gist of Ameriks's argument is that in spite of Kant's specific criticism of the paralogistic arguments of pure psychology, Kant retained a favorable attitude toward the theoretical and not just practical postulation of such properties as immateriality and transcendental freedom at the noumenal level--but this turns out to mean little more than that Kant accepted his own transcendental idealism. This is hardly revolutionary, and the interest of the point is far from strengthened by Ameriks's own conclusion that transcendental idealism cannot be fully proved. (shrink)

Review of Béatrice Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

This is a series of two articles examining Kant’s attitude toward mystical experiences and the relation between his interest in these and his interest in constructing a Critical system of metaphysics.“The Critical Dreams” begins by questioning the traditional division between “Critical” and “pre-Critical” periods in Kant’s development. After explaining Kant’s Critical method, his 1766 book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer... is examined and found to contain all the essential elements of that method. The onlykey element which is missing is his “Copernican” (...) insight. Although Hume may have played an important role in the early 1760’s in awakening Kant to the importance of his Critical method, this Copernican insight seems to have its roots more in Swedenborg than in Hume. Moreover, [DREAMS] itself should no longer be interpreted as evincing a sceptical or empirical stage in Kant’s development, but can now be seen as setting for Kant the problem which his Critical System was intended to solve. [DREAMS] suggests the two strands of this problem: How is mystical experience possible? and How is metaphysics possible? [DREAMS] offers a Critical answer to the first question, but does not fully develop its implications. (shrink)

: According to Kant, the arguments of rational psychology are formal fallacies that he calls transcendental paralogisms. It remains heavily debated whether there actually is any formal error in the inferences Kant presents: according to Grier and Allison, they are deductively invalid syllogisms, whereas Bennett, Ameriks, and Van Cleve deny that they are formal fallacies. I advance an interpretation that reconciles these extremes: transcendental paralogisms are sound in general logic but constitute formal fallacies in transcendental logic. By formalising the paralogistic (...) inference, I will pinpoint the error as an illegitimate existential presupposition. Since - unlike transcendental logic - general logic abstracts from all objects, this error can only be detected in transcendental logic. (shrink)

Israel Gottlieb Canz’s Uberzeugender Beweiß, first published in 1741 and reprinted here in its second, expanded edition stands as his most influential discussion of the soul’s immortality, with one contemporary pronouncing it to be “one of the best [treatments of immortality] that we have.” In this text, Canz seeks to augment and supplement traditional Wolffian proofs by considering, first, the grounds for the soul’s immortality that are contained in its own nature and, second, the grounds for the same that are (...) found in God. In addition, Canz extends his treatment to include a detailed discussion of the souls of children and he offers speculations concerning the soul’s condition in the afterlife. On account of its systematic presentation and original argumentation, Canz’s Beweiß represents a key contribution to Leibniz-Wolffian rational psychology, and through the critical reaction it generated it would help shape the debate concerning the soul’s immortality for years after its original publication. (shrink)

This major study of Kant provides a detailed examination of the development and function of the doctrine of transcendental illusion in his theoretical philosophy. The author shows that a theory of 'illusion' plays a central role in Kant's arguments about metaphysical speculation and scientific theory. Indeed, she argues that we cannot understand Kant unless we take seriously his claim that the mind inevitably acts in accordance with ideas and principles that are 'illusory'. Taking this claim seriously, we can make much (...) better sense of Kant's arguments and reach a deeper understanding of the role he allots human reason in science. (shrink)

Dans la doctrine cartésienne du Cogito, ergo sum, on peut dégager deux idées : l’idée d’une vérité indépendante, fournissant d’elle-même des preuves suffisantes d’authenticité ; l’idée d’une évidence vécue dont toute la force tiendrait à la conscience plus ou moins riche et plus ou moins précise que le moi pourrait prendre de sa réalité intime. L’interprétation cartésienne du moi flotte entre le moi qui se définit par la pensée et le moi qui se définit par l’expérience. Kant, inspiré lui aussi (...) par le désir de résoudre au moyen d’une même notion le problème de la vérité et celui du sujet, est amené à la construction de l’aperception transcendantale ou de la conscience tout court, construction qui, à tout bien considérer, se révèle comme conception d’un moi dépersonnalisé.La « psychologie de la connaissance », élaborée par Richard Hônigswald, élude ces ambiguïtés. Elle est une branche de l’arbre néo-criticiste et veut ramener au même point la logique et la psychologie. Elle rejette l’hypothèse du moi transcendental ; elle insiste, au contraire, sur la réciprocité des rapports du sujet, de l’expérience vécue et de l’objectivité ; elle affirme une solidarité et une interdépendance réelles entre la notion de «validité » d’une part, et celle du moi psychologique, de l’autre. (shrink)

In Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness, Pierre Keller examines Kant's theory of self-consciousness and argues that it succeeds in explaining how both subjective and objective experience are possible. Previous interpretations of Kant's theory have held that he treats all self-consciousness as knowledge of objective states of affairs, and also that self-consciousness can be interpreted as knowledge of personal identity. By developing this striking new interpretation Keller is able to argue that transcendental self-consciousness underwrites a general theory of objectivity and (...) subjectivity at the same time. (shrink)

Kant made a number of highly original discoveries about the mind - about its ability to synthesise a single, coherent representation of self and world, about the unity it must have to do so, and about the mind's awareness of itself and the semantic apparatus it uses to achieve this awareness. The past fifty years have seen intense activity in research on human cognition. Even so, Kant's discoveries have not been superseded, and some of them have not even been assimilated (...) into current thinking. That is particularly true of his work on unity and on the semantic apparatus of self-awareness. The first four chapters of this book present a comprehensive overview of Kant's model for non-specialists, an overview largely unencumbered by detailed exegesis. The work then offers a close study of five major discussions of the mind in the Critique of Pure Reason and Anthropology. (shrink)

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so is (...) to overlook the distinctive rational psychology developed by Christian Wolff, which emphasized the empirical foundation of any rational cognition of the soul, and which was widely influential among eighteenth-century German philosophers, including Kant. In this book, Dyck reveals how the received conception of the aim and results of Kant's Paralogisms must be revised in light of a proper understanding of the rational psychology that is the most proximate target of Kant's attack. In particular, he contends that Kant's criticism hinges upon exposing the illusory basis of the rational psychologist's claims inasmuch as he falls prey to the appearance of the soul as being given in inner experience. Moreover, Dyck demonstrates that significant light can be shed on Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence by considering the Paralogisms in this historical context.Readership: Scholars and advanced students in history of philosophy, especially those working on Kant. (shrink)

James Van Cleve examines the main topics from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, such as transcendental idealism, necessity and analyticity, space and time, substance and cause, noumena and things-in-themselves, problems of the self, and rational theology. He also discusses the relationship between Kant's thought and that of modern anti-realists, such as Putnam and Dummett. Because Van Cleve focuses upon specific problems rather than upon entire passages or sections of the Critique, he makes Kant's work more accessible to the serious student (...) and scholar. (shrink)

Kant’s claim in the Subjective Deduction that we have multiple fundamental mental powers appears to be susceptible to some a priori metaphysical arguments made against multiple fundamental mental powers by Christian Wolff who held that these powers would violate the unity of thought and entail that the soul is an extended composite. I argue, however, that in the Second Paralogism and his lectures on metaphysics, Kant provides arguments that overcome these objections by showing that it is possible that a composite (...) could ground the unity of thought, that properties are powers and therefore the soul could possess multiple powers, and the soul is a thing in itself so it cannot be an extended composite. These arguments lend additional support to the attribution of multiple mental powers to us in the Subjective Deduction. (shrink)