Kant and the Problem of Self-Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Luca Forgione

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 227
• Series: Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book addresses the problem of self-knowledge in Kant’s philosophy. As Kant writes in his major works of the critical period, it is due to the simple and empty representation ‘I think’ that the subject’s capacity for self-consciousness enables the subject to represent its own mental dimension. This book articulates Kant’s theory of self-knowledge on the basis of the following three philosophical problems:

1) a semantic problem regarding the type of reference of the representation ‘I’;
2) an epistemic problem regarding the type of knowledge relative to the thinking subject produced by the representation ‘I think’; and
3) a strictly metaphysical problem regarding the features assigned to the thinking subject’s nature.

The author connects the relevant scholarly literature on Kant with contemporary debates on the huge philosophical field of self-knowledge. He develops a formal reading according to which the unity of self-consciousness does not presuppose the identity of a real subject, but a formal identity based on the representation ‘I think’.

About the Author
Luca Forgione is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Language and in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Basilicata, Italy.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Key to Abbreviations of Kantian Works
Acknowledgements
A Brief Introduction
1 Self-Knowledge and Self-Consciousness
The Problems of Self-Knowledge
The Question of Self-Consciousness
Indexicality
Immunity to Error Through Misidentification
Kant’s Theory of the Mind: Faculties and Representations
The Inner Sense
An Introspective Account of Self-Consciousness
The Inner Sense and the Ideality of Time
The Epistemic Limits of the Inner Sense
The Transcendental Deduction and the Principle of the Unity of Apperception
The Metaphysical Deduction
The Transcendental Deduction
I Think and the Principle of the Necessary Synthetic Unity of Apperception
2 Two Senses of ‘I think’
The Synthetic Unity of Apperception and the I Think
Transcendental Dialectic: The I Think and the Analysis of the Paralogisms
The Analysis of the Paralogisms
I as a Concept
The ‘I Exist Thinking’: The Empirical Apperception
Thinking Is Being
The Concept of a ‘Transcendental Subject’
I think qua Thinking and I think qua Representation
3 The Problem of Self-identification
‘I think’ and the Question of Self-Identification
The Genesis of the Cartesian Self
Two No-Ownership Readings and One Thesis of Exclusion
The I of Pure Apperception and the I as Subject
The I of Empirical Apperception
4 The Simple Representation I and the Transcendental Designation
I Think and the Direct Reference Theory
Kant Between Conceptualism and Non-Conceptualism: Concepts and Intuitions
Intuition as an Indexical Representation
The Logical Form of Singular Judgments
The Dismissal of the Lowest Species
The Conceptualist Form of Singular Terms
The Role of Designation in Natural Kind Terms
Kripke and Putnam on the Theory of Direct Reference
Kant and the A Priori Nature of the Judgment “Gold Is a Yellow Metal”
The Relationship of Term, Concept, and Natural Substance
The Semantic Reflection in the Logical Corpus
The Role of Designation
The Simple Representation ‘I’ and the Role of Transcendental Designation
5 On de se and de re
Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description: The Weak Conceptualist View
The Theory of the Transcendental Object
Non-Conceptualism Versus Weak Conceptualism
“The Object Must Be Thought of Only as Something in General = x”
De se Thoughts Between Descriptivism and Singularism
Kant on de se
I Think and de se Thoughts
I as Form of Thinking
The Paradox of Self-Consciousness and the Non-Conceptual Forms of Self-Awareness
The Problem of Self-Knowledge
The Dualism of the I of Apperception and the I as Human Being
Longuenesse and Ginsborg on the I Considered as Human Being
Capozzi and the Role of Attention in the Inner Sense
A Brief Conclusion
References
Index