Empirical consciousness explained: Self-affection, (self-)consciousness and perception in the B deduction

Kantian Review 11:29-54 (2006)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Few of Kant’s doctrines are as difficult to understand as that of self-affection. Its brief career in the published literature consists principally in its unheralded introduction in the Transcendental Aesthetic and unexpected re-appearance at a key moment in the Deduction chapter in the B edition of the first Critique. Kant’s commentators, confronted with the difficulty of this doctrine, have naturally resorted to various strategies of clarification, ranging from distinguishing between empirical and transcendental self-affection, divorcing self-affection from the claims of self-knowledge with which Kant explicitly connects it, and, perhaps least justified of all, ignoring the doctrine altogether. Yet the connection between self-affection and central Critical doctrines (such as the transcendental synthesis of the imagination) marks all of these strategies as last resorts. In this paper, I seek to provide a clearer outline of the constellation of those issues which inform Kant’s discussion of self-affection. More particularly, I intend to explain the crucial role played by self-affection in the account of the transcendental conditions of perception provided late in the B Deduction.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
1,139 (#9,859)

6 months
111 (#29,601)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Corey W. Dyck
University of Western Ontario

Citations of this work

Kant on Inner Sensations and the Parity between Inner and Outer Sense.Yibin Liang - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7:307-338.
Consciousness as Inner Sensation: Crusius and Kant.Jonas Jervell Indregard - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
Kant and the determinacy of intuition.Jacob Browning - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):65-79.

View all 8 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

An essay concerning human understanding.John Locke - 1689 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Pauline Phemister.
Critique of Pure Reason.Immanuel Kant - 1998 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edited by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. Translated by Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.John Locke - 1979 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 169 (2):221-222.
Treatise of Human Nature.L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) - 1978 - Oxford University Press.
New Essays on Human Understanding.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - 1981 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Peter Remnant & Jonathan Bennett.

View all 15 references / Add more references