Beatrice Longuenesse presents an original exploration of our understanding of ourselves and the way we talk about ourselves. In the first part of the book she discusses contemporary analyses of our use of "I" in language and thought, and compares them to Kant's account of self-consciousness,especially the type of self-consciousness expressed in the proposition "I think." According to many contemporary philosophers, necessarily, any instance of our use of "I" is backed by our consciousness of our own body. For Kant, in contrast, "I think" just expresses our consciousness of beingengaged in bringing rational unity into the contents of our mental states. In the second part of the book, Longuenesse analyzes the details of Kant's view and argues that contemporary discussions in philosophy and psychology stand to benefit from Kant's insights into self-consciousness and the unityof consciousness. The third and final part of the book outlines similarities between Kant's view of the structure of mental life grounding our uses of "I" in "I think" and in the moral "I ought to," on the one hand; and Freud's analysis of the organizations of mental processes he calls "ego" and"superego" on the other hand. Longuenesse argues that Freudian metapsychology offers a path to a naturalization of Kant's transcendental view of the mind. It offers a developmental account of the normative capacities that ground our uses of "I," which Kant thought could not be accounted for withoutappealing to a world of pure intelligences, distinct from the empirical, natural world of physical entities.

The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant's acknowledged masterpiece, in which he tackles the question of how we can possibly have knowledge that does not rest on experience (a priori knowledge). The first half of the Critique advances a constructive theory of human cognition and defends the possibility of human knowledge against the skeptical empiricism of Hume. These sections of the Critique are difficult for beginners and for advanced students alike. While there exist many scholarly works discussing the Critique on an advanced level, this book is explicitly designed to be read alongside the text by first-time readers of Kant. Dicker makes Kant's views and arguments as accessible as possible without oversimplifying them, and synthesizes the views of contemporary scholars. Kant's Theory of Knowledge will be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students struggling with this notoriously difficult yet deeply influential thinker.

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

Explores the relationship between self-knowledge, individuality, and personal development by reconstructing Kant's account of personhood.

Kant's discussion of the relations between cognition and self-consciousness lie at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason , in the celebrated transcendental deduction. Although this section of Kant's masterpiece is widely believed to contain important insights into cognition and self-consciousness, it has long been viewed as unusually obscure. Many philosophers have tried to avoid the transcendental psychology that Kant employed. By contrast, Patricia Kitcher follows Kant's careful delineation of the necessary conditions for knowledge and his intricate argument that knowledge requires self-consciousness. She argues that far from being an exercise in armchair psychology, the thesis that thinkers must be aware of the connections among their mental states offers an astute analysis of the requirements of rational thought.The book opens by situating Kant's theories in the then contemporary debates about 'apperception,' personal identity and the relations between object cognition and self-consciousness. After laying out Kant's argument that the distinctive kind of knowledge that humans have requires a unified self- consciousness, Kitcher considers the implications of his theory for current problems in the philosophy of mind. If Kant is right that rational cognition requires acts of thought that are at least implicitly conscious, then theories of consciousness face a second 'hard problem' beyond the familiar difficulties with the qualities of sensations. How is conscious reasoning to be understood? Kitcher shows that current accounts of the self-ascription of belief have great trouble in explaining the case where subjects know their reasons for the belief. She presents a 'new' Kantian approach to handling this problem. In this way, the book reveals Kant as a thinker of great relevance to contemporary philosophy, one whose allegedly obscure achievements provide solutions to problems that are still with us.

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

The unconscious raises relevant problems in the theory of knowledge as regards non-conceptual contents and obscure representations. In the philosophy of mind, it bears on the topic of the unity of consciousness and the notion of the transcendental Self. It is a key-topic of logic with respect to the distinction between determinate-indeterminate judgments and prejudices, and in aesthetics it appears in connection with the problems of reflective judgments and of the genius. Finally, it is a relevant issue also in moral philosophy in defining the irrational aspects of the human being. The purpose of the present volume is to fill a substantial gap in Kant research while offering a comprehensive survey of the topic in different areas of research, such as history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and anthropology.

The fourteen original essays in this volume explore Kant's writings on the mind, covering such topics as intuition, imagination, inner sense, self-consciousness, and the will. These are central to any understanding of Kant's critical philosophy and of continuing relevance to contemporary debates.

A wide-ranging and original interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment.