Abstract
In this paper, I challenge the assumption that Kant’s Third Paralogism has to do, first and foremost, with the question of personal identity. Beginning with a consideration of the treatments of the soul’s personality in Christian Wolff’s rational psychology, I show that, despite being influenced by Locke’s novel account of personhood and confessing a dissatisfaction with the Scholastic definition of the term, Wolff maintained the agreement between his account of personality and the traditional conception. Moreover, Wolff did not put this concept to a forensic use but considered its primary application to be in the context of the demonstration of the soul’s immortality which, according to him, required that after the death of the body the human soul retained its status personalitatis, understood as its distinct capacity to be conscious of its identity over time. Wolff’s account of the soul’s personality, and the use to which he put it, proved rather influential for metaphysicians like G. F. Meier and Moses Mendelssohn, and Kant’s lectures in the 1770’s also betray this influence. Considering the Third Paralogism in light of this context I claim that, rather than taking up the question of whether the numerical identity of the soul can be inferred from the meagre resources of the I think, what is at issue is the rational psychologist’s account of how we are conscious of our numerical identity in different times. Despite disagreeing with the rational psychologist on this score, Kant nonetheless contends that the way in which we are, in fact, conscious of our numerical identity in all times qualifies us as persons and suffices for that concept’s use in the proof of the soul’s immortality. This reading thus makes sense of Kant’s claim that the soul’s personality, even with its transcendental grounding, is “necessary and sufficient for practical use,” and provides a charitable alternative to the recent allegation of a paralogism of pure practical reason on Kant’s part.
© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
