This is the first English-language book to examine Kant's empirical psychology, applying it throughout Kant's philosophy and to contemporary philosophical issues.

For the last 100 years historians have denigrated the psychology of the Critique of Pure Reason. In opposition, Patricia Kitcher argues that we can only understand the deduction of the categories in terms of Kant's attempt to fathom the psychological prerequisites of thought, and that this investigation illuminates thinking itself. Kant tried to understand the "task environment" of knowledge and thought: Given the data we acquire and the scientific generalizations we make, what basic cognitive capacities are necessary to perform these feats? What do these capacities imply about the inevitable structure of our knowledge? Kitcher specifically considers Kant's claims about the unity of the thinking self; the spatial forms of human perceptions; the relations among mental states necessary for them to have content; the relations between perceptions and judgment; the malleability essential to empirical concepts; the structure of empirical concepts required for inductive inference; and the limits of philosophical insight into psychological processes.

Immanuel Kant is strict about the limits of self-knowledge: our inner sense gives us only appearances, never the reality, of ourselves. Kant may seem to begin his inquiries with an uncritical conception of cognitive limits, but in Kant and the Subject of Critique, Avery Goldman argues that, even for Kant, a reflective act must take place before any judgment occurs. Building on Kant's metaphysics, which uses the soul, the world, and God as regulative principles, Goldman demonstrates how Kant can open doors to reflection, analysis, language, sensibility, and understanding. By establishing a regulative self, Goldman offers a way to bring unity to the subject through Kant's seemingly circular reasoning, allowing for critique and, ultimately, knowledge.

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to Kant's lectures on anthropology and their philosophical importance.

The theory of action underlying Immanuel Kant's ethical theory is the subject of this book. What 'maxims' are, and how we act on maxims, are explained here in light of both the historical context of Kant's thought, and his classroom lectures on psychology and ethics. Arguing against the current of much recent scholarship, Richard McCarty makes a strong case for interpreting Kant as having embraced psychological determinism, a version of the 'belief-desire model' of human motivation, and a literal, 'two-worlds' metaphysics. On this interpretation, actions in the sensible world are always effects of prior psychological causes. Their explaining causal laws are the maxims of agents' characters. And agents act freely if, acting also in an intelligible world, what they do there results in their having the characters they have here, in the sensible world. McCarty additionally shows how this interpretation is fruitful for solving familiar problems perennially plaguing Kant's moral psychology.

Philosophers, anthropologists and biologists have long puzzled over the question of human nature. In this lucid and wide-ranging introduction to Kant's philosophy of human nature - which is essential for understanding his thought as a whole - Patrick Frierson assesses Kant's theories and examines his critics.

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in the 'Critique of Pure Reason', in light of its 18th-century German context. He reinterprets the aims and results of the Paralogisms, and illuminates Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence.

Offsetting a study of Kant's theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, Kant's Organicism offers readers an accessible portrait of Kant's scientific milieu in order to show that his standing interests in natural history and its questions regarding organic generation were critical for the development of his theoretical philosophy. By reading Kant's theoretical work in light of his connection to the life sciences?especially his reflections on the epigenetic theory of formation and genesis?Jennifer Mensch provides a new understanding of much that has been otherwise obscure or misunderstood in it. ?Epigenesis”?a term increasingly used in the late eighteenth century to describe an organic, nonmechanical view of nature's generative capacities?attracted Kant as a model for understanding the origin of reason itself. Mensch shows how this model allowed Kant to conceive of cognition as a self-generated event and thus to approach the history of human reason as if it were an organic species with a natural history of its own. She uncovers Kant's commitment to the model offered by epigenesis in his first major theoretical work, the Critique of Pure Reason, and demonstrates how it informed his concept of the organic, generative role given to the faculty of reason within his system as a whole. In doing so, she offers a fresh approach to Kant's famed first Critique and a new understanding of his epistemological theory.

Closely paralleling the history of psychology is the history of its critics, their theories, and their contributions. The Critique of Psychology is the first book to trace this alternate history, from a unique perspective that complements the many existing empirical, theoretical, and social histories of the field. Thomas Teo cogently synthesizes major historical and theoretical narratives to describe two centuries of challenges to—and the reactions of—the mainstream. Some of these critiques of content, methodology, relevance, and philosophical worldview have actually influenced and become integrated into the canon; others pose moral questions still under debate. All are accessibly presented so that readers may judge their value for themselves: - Kant’s critique of rational and empirical psychology at the end of the 18th century - The natural-scientific critique of philosophical psychology in the 19th century - The human-scientific critique of natural-scientific psychology - The Marxist traditions of critique - Feminist and postmodern critiques and the contemporary mainstream - Postcolonial critiques and the shift from cross-cultural to multicultural psychology This is not a book of critique for critique’s sake: Teo defines the field as a work in progress with goals that are evolving yet constant. In emphasizing ethical and political questions faced by psychology as a discipline, this visionary book points students, academics, and practitioners toward new possibilities for their shared future.

First essay collection devoted to Kant's faculty of feeling, a concept relevant to issues in ethics, aesthetics, and the emotions.