Kant On Self Knowledge And Self Formation

Explores the relationship between self-knowledge, individuality, and personal development by reconstructing Kant's account of personhood.

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’.

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

A comprehensive overview of Kant's discoveries about the mind for non-specialists.

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.

Kant's Thinker examines the Critique of Pure Reason's account of the relation between cognition and self-consciousness. It shows how the theory that cognizers must understand their mental states as standing in relations of rational connection has implications for theories of the self-ascription of belief, consciousness and knowledge of other subjects.

In Kant on Conscience Emre Kazim offers the first systematic treatment of Kant’s theory of conscience. Contrary to the scholarly consensus, Kazim argues that Kant’s various discussions of conscience are philosophically coherent aspects of the same unified thing (‘Unity Thesis’).