Abstract

In this article I attempt to sketch a Kantian view of personal identity. Making use of Kant's distinction between perception and conception as necessary components of experience, I argue that experience requires the existence over time of a subject, and that this persisting subject is a condition of experience and hence is transcen- dentally distinct from any object of experience, including the subject's body. This also implies that consciousness, or the appearance of the world to the subject, cannot identified with a brain process or any other object, and thus that central state materialism must be false. The view of subjectivity which emerges from this analysis bears some resemblance, I believe, to Kant's doctrine of the transcendental self. After this very abstract analysis I present a thought-experiment which attempts to illustrate the difference between subjectivity and any objective fact, and to show more clearly the status of the subject as a necessary condition of experience.