Abstract
The purpose of my essay is to contribute to dispelling the puzzle of our self-knowledge by analyzing the transcendental and empiricist approaches of Kant and John Perry. The guiding argument is to examine whether a position advocating the empirical consciousness we have of our mental states may explain self-knowledge and personal identity sufficiently or whether it should amount to Kantian standards set by his transcendental theory of knowledge. My hypothesis includes three aspects. First, I argue that our whole experience originates from the same transcendental structure of the human mind. From this, it follows that systematic knowledge is impossible for a “selfless” subject. Second, I differentiate between transcendental self-consciousness and empirical self-knowledge and apply these methodological tools to analyze knowledge from the first-person perspective. Third, I reconstruct the Kantian notion of personal identity and demonstrate that the epistemological problem of personal identity can only be sound when formulated as a transcendental-logical problem.
