Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
- 2 Kant's theory of the subject
- 3 Kant's conception of awareness and self-awareness
- 4 Kant's theory of apperceptive self-awareness
- 5 The mind in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 6 The first-edition subjective deduction: the object of ‘one experience’
- 7 Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
- 8 The Third Paralogism: unity without identity over time
- 9 The second-edition subjective deduction: self-representing representations
- 10 Nature and awareness of the self
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
2 - Kant's theory of the subject
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
- 2 Kant's theory of the subject
- 3 Kant's conception of awareness and self-awareness
- 4 Kant's theory of apperceptive self-awareness
- 5 The mind in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 6 The first-edition subjective deduction: the object of ‘one experience’
- 7 Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
- 8 The Third Paralogism: unity without identity over time
- 9 The second-edition subjective deduction: self-representing representations
- 10 Nature and awareness of the self
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
At the beginning of Chapter 1, it was suggested that Kant made discoveries about four things to do with the mind: the role of synthesis, the unity of experience and consciousness, the special form of self-awareness I call apperceptive self-awareness (ASA), and the mind's status as a special kind of representation. Before we turn to the texts that lay out these ideas, it might be a good idea to construct an overview of Kant's model, one unencumbered by filigree of close exegesis. That is the task of this and the next two chapters; we will also attempt to display the relevance of some of Kant's ideas to contemporary research. This chapter takes up Kant's theory of synthesis and unity, Chapters 3 and 4 his views on awareness and self-awareness.
The need for a subject
Let us start with this question: Why do we suppose that experience needs a subject in the first place? The level of mental activity on which much current research into the mind focuses does not need a subject. To identify the level in question, let me use a personal example. As a result of having remarkably bad handwriting, I am all too often in the position of not being able to recognize a word I have written some time before. If, however, I take a careful look at the scrawl I put down and then go and do something else for a while, almost invariably I will eventually recognize what I wrote.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant and the Mind , pp. 24 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994