This book was written with two audiences in mind. The first is the community of cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, and students of cognition in general. The second, of course, is the community of Kant scholars and those with a special interest in Kant. The case I want to make to the first audience is that some of Kant's thoughts and discoveries, as I put it in Chapter 1, not only have not been superseded by more recent work on the mind, but have not even been assimilated by it. I hope I will give this first audience reason to believe that Kant still has things to teach us. For the second audience, I will argue that some aspects of Kant's theory (better, theories) of mind have not been well understood, especially in recent English-language commentaries, and that some others have been missed altogether.

The book has been constructed with these dual objectives in view. For the first audience, Chapters 1–4 attempt to construct an overview of Kant's model of the mind as a whole, without a great deal of detailed exegesis or textual justification for the views ascribed to him. (I try to give just enough quotations and citations to show that Kant did say the things I attribute to him.) The ideas in Chapter 4 on Kant's theory of self-awareness are the part of the project that, as Kant put it in connection with his Transcendental Deduction, “have cost me the greatest labour”, and I can only echo his comment: “– labour, as I hope, not unrewarded” (Axvii).