Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness
Pierre Keller
Language: English
Pages: 296
ISBN: 0521004691
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Pierre Keller examines Kant's theory of self-consciousness and argues that it succeeds in explaining how both subjective and objective experience are possible. He argues for a new understanding of Kant's conception of self-consciousness as the capacity to abstract not only from what one happens to be experiencing, but also from one's own personal identity. By developing this new interpretation he is able to argue that transcendental self-consciousness underwrites a general theory of objectivity and subjectivity at the same time.
self-consciousness is a construct out of impersonal activities of information processing. She insists that an understanding of the self as an agency for connecting representations can only be made intelligible by collapsing the transcendental and the transcendent self into the empirical self, where the transcendental self is the self as an enabling condition of experience, the transcendent self is the self as it exists independently of any experience, and the empirical self is the self that we
is indeed a connection between self-affection and outer affection. But this connection is based on the thesis that self-interpretation depends on the interpretation of what is outside of us. The interpretation of objects outside of us does depend on information about objects inside of us, as well, but the argument here is based on the relation between self-interpretation and interpretation of what is outside of us. Working from the assumption that outer affection is being affected by external objects
right that we do experience space and time at least as if they were each of them necessarily connected in an experiential whole. However, the unity of space and time is, at best, a phenom- The unity of intuition: completing the B-Deduction enological fact that needs explanation and defense. The problem with the Allisonian interpretation is that it offers no prospects for providing such a defense and thus makes Kant’s claims for the unity and objectivity of experience ultimately depend on a
spaces to public space and time as a whole. If relatively persistent objects come to be and Time-consciousness in the Analogies pass away, there will be nothing that distinguishes the spatio-temporal point at which they come to be or pass away and hence no way of linking them determinately to other objects that come to be and pass away. This is a powerful argument so long as one accepts the idea that spaces and times must be precisely distinguishable. But, plausible as the assumption is
a syllogism. The minor premise of the syllogism then takes the soul to be a person as defined in the first premise, but the soul must be a person in this sense only from the first-person point of view. The fallacy of ambiguity involved in the Third Paralogism is again to take what is true from the first-person point of view and treat it as if it were true from any point of view, that is, as if it were true absolutely. This leads to the conclusion that the soul is a person in the sense of a particular