Apperception And Self Consciousness In Kant And German Idealism

In Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism, Dennis Schulting examines the themes of reflexivity, self-consciousness, representation and apperception in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism more widely. Central to Schulting's argument is the claim that all human experience is inherently self-referential and that this is part of a self-reflexivity of thought, or what is called transcendental apperception, a Kantian insight that was first apparent in the work of Christian Wolff and came to inform all of German Idealism. In this rigorous text, Schulting establishes the historical roots of Kant's thought and traces it through to his immediate successors, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He specifically examines the cognitive role of selfconsciousness and its relation to idealism and situates it in a clear and coherent history of rationalist philosophy.

Hegel is presented as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant only enhance the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism in this original interpretation.

Provides a systematic overview of the topic of self in classical German philosophy, focusing on the period around 1800 and covering Kant, Fichte, Holderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.

1. Introduction Kant considered the doctrine of transcendental idealism an indisp- sable part of the theory of knowledge presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. My aim in this book is to present a new defense of the coh- ence and plausibility of Kant’s transcendental idealism and its indisp- sability for his theory of knowledge. I will show that the main argument of the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic is - fensible independently of some of Kant’s claims which are said to threaten its coherence. I have undertaken an inquiry into the coherence of Kant’s transc- dental idealism for the following reasons. A defense of the coherence of transcendental idealism is required by the existing state of Kantian scholarship. The claim that Kant’s transcendental idealism is incoh- ent has appeared in various forms over the last two centuries. The most powerful and elaborate criticism of Kant’s transcendental idealism is found in Part Four of Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense. Several comm- tators have tried to reestablish its coherence. Although Allison and other commentators have contributed ideas that are valuable for an 1 account of the coherence of Kant’s transcendental idealism, their - guments fall short as a response to the standard objection. Indeed, the claim that Kant’s transcendental idealism is incoherent continues to be the view held by most thinkers. I have limited my goal in this book to establishing the coherence of Kant’s transcendental idealism due to two related reasons.

This work identifies Kant’s doctrine of inner sense as a central element within the ‘architectonic of pure reason’ of the first Critique, exposes its variant construals, and considers the implications of its problematicity for Kant’s theoretical philosophy most generally.

This study offers a striking new interpretation of Kant's theory of self-consciousness.

Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy" is rightly renowned for its criticism of the metaphysical pretensions of reason unaided by experience. It therefore seems ironic that, within a single generation, some of Kant's most important followers argued that th

Der Band enthält zweiundzwanzig Texte von anerkannten Experten der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, die sich mit der Theorie der Apperzeption, mit der transzendentalen Deduktion der Kategorien und mit den Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft aus sehr unterschiedlichen Perspektiven auseinandersetzen. Untersucht werden vor allem (1) die philosophischen Quellen der Kantischen Begriffe „Apperzeption" und „Selbstbewusstsein", (2) die historische Entwicklung der Lehre der Apperzeption und der Deduktion der Kategorien in der sogenannten vor-kritischen Phase, (3) Struktur und Inhalte sowohl der A- als auch der B-Deduktion der Kategorien, und schließlich (4) den (Kantischen, aber auch nicht Kantischen) Sinn der Begriffe der „Apperzeption" und des „Selbstbewusstseins".