The remarks just noted about ‘bare consciousness’ and so on by no means exhaust the concerns that can be raised about Kant and what we can know about the mind....

If our actions are pre-determined and we merely bounce around like snooker-balls, we cannot be described as free and morality doesn’t apply to us. Kant could...

We have already discussed Kant's view of the mind's handling of space and time, so we can proceed directly to his doctrine of synthesis. As Kant put it in one of...

This may be called intellectual contentment. The sensible contentment (improperly so-called) which rests on the satisfaction of the inclinations, however delicate...

Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic. It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must handle them, if our experience is to have the...

Inclination is blind and slavish, whether it be of a good sort or not, and, when morality is in question, reason must not play the part merely of guardian to...

We will close by returning to the question of Kant's relationship to contemporary cognitive research. As we saw, some of Kant's most characteristic doctrines about...

In the search for intrinsic ‘good’, Kant did not believe that any outcome was inherently good. Pleasure or happiness could result out of the most evil acts. ...

The same would hold for all other properties of thinking beings. Since Kant also sometimes viewed immortality, i.e., personal continuity beyond death, as a...

When we find ourselves obliged to go so far, namely, to the connection with an intelligible world, to find the possibility of the summum bonum, which reason points...

We do not follow predetermined laws. However, we must act according to some laws, otherwise our actions are random and without purpose. As a result, rational...

To every faculty of the mind we can attribute an interest, that is, a principle, that contains the condition on which alone the former is called into exercise....

Freedom itself becomes in this way (namely, indirectly) capable of an enjoyment which cannot be called happiness, because it does not depend on the positive...

An imperative is a statement of what should be done. We have said before that Hume realised you can’t get a should statement out of an is statement. In other...

In Kant's own work, he then put the idea of transcendental designation to work to explain how one can appear to oneself to be substantial, simple and persisting...

It is a sublime thing in human nature to be determined to actions immediately by a purely rational law; sublime even is the illusion that regards the subjective...

Turning now to Kant's view of the mind, we will start with a point about method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not entirely consistent views on the empirical...

Now, as the promotion of this summum bonum, the conception of which contains this connection, is a priori a necessary object of our will and inseparably attached to...

Image source While both schools sought to trace out the identity of the practical principles of virtue and happiness, they were not agreed as to the way in which...

When we find ourselves obliged to go so far, namely, to the connection with an intelligible world, to find the possibility of the summum bonum, which reason points...

By primacy between two or more things connected by reason, I understand the prerogative, belonging to one, of being the first determining principle in the...

Kant generated the special treatment he needed by focussing first on reference to self. Here are some of the things that he said about reference to oneself as...

The synthesis of apprehension is somewhat more shadowy than the other two. In the second edition, the idea does not even appear until §26, i.e., late in TD. At...

Have we not, however, a word which does not express enjoyment, as happiness does, but indicates a satisfaction in one’s existence, an analogue of the happiness...

Freedom and the consciousness of it as a faculty of following the moral law with unyielding resolution is independence of inclinations, at least as motives...

Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, the brilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD). Recall the two movements just discussed,...

The third kind of synthesis is synthesis of recognition in a concept. To experience objects for Kant, first I have to relate the materials out of which they are...

What Kant likely had in mind is nicely captured in a remark of Bennett's (1974, p. 83): to think of myself as a plurality of things is to think of my being...

How does apperception give rise to consciousness of oneself and one's states? In the passage just quoted from the Anthropology, notice the phrase “consciousness...

The syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition of single objects march in a single temporal/object-generational line. Suddenly at A106 Kant makes a...

The Emperor drove Baron Beyens in his dog-cart; the Empress drove with the Princess Metternich in a victoria to the field, where she left her and returned to the...

The synthesis of reproduction in imagination has two elements, a synthesis proper and associations necessary for performing that synthesis. (Kant explicitly treats...

As we said, Kant rewrote both TD and the chapter on the Paralogisms for the second edition of CPR, leaving only their introductions intact. In the course of doing...

However, as in this philosophical and critical age such empiricism can scarcely be serious, and it is probably put forward only as an intellectual exercise and for...

Names that designate the followers of a sect have always been accompanied with much injustice; just as if one said, "N is an Idealist." For although he not only...

At my answer that I had never seen one, nor anything nearer to one than people going out with a gun and coming back with nothing else, he laughed and said, "I must...

Many commentators hold that consciousness of self is central to the Critical philosophy. There is reason to question this: unified consciousness is central, but...

The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant's second project, contains Kant's most original insights into the nature of consciousness of...

For Pad not the moral law been previously distinctly thought in our reason, we should never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a thing as freedom,...

With this faculty, transcendental freedom is also established; freedom, namely, in that absolute sense in which speculative reason required it in its use of the...

Speculative reason could only exhibit this concept (of freedom) problematically as not impossible to thought, without assuring it any objective reality, and merely...

Inasmuch as the reality of the concept of freedom is proved by an apodeictic law of practical reason, it is the keystone of the whole system of pure reason, even...

Even an inclination to what is right (e.g., to beneficence), though it may much facilitate the efficacy of the moral maxims, cannot produce any. For in these all...

Nothing worse could happen to these labours than that anyone should make the unexpected discovery that there neither is, nor can be, any a priori knowledge at all....

The ideas of God and immortality, however, are not conditions of the moral law, but only conditions of the necessary object of a will determined by this law; that...

However they are the conditions of the application of the morally determined will to its object, which is given to it a priori, viz., the summum bonum. Consequently...

Here we have what, as far as speculative reason is concerned, is a merely subjective principle of assent, which, however, is objectively valid for a reason equally...

We have here only to do with the distinction of imperatives into problematical, assertorial, and apodeictic. Similarly in the note in which I have pared the moral...

It is a clear contradiction to try to extract necessity from a principle of experience (ex pumice aquam), and to try by this to give a judgement true universality...

So much by way of justification of the proceeding by which, in this work, the notions and principles of pure speculative reason which have already undergone their...

The union of causality as freedom with causality as rational mechanism, the former established by the moral law, the latter by the law of nature in the same...

In this manner, then, the a priori principles of two faculties of the mind, the faculty of cognition and that of desire, would be found and determined as to the...

I have no fear, as regards this treatise, of the reproach that I wish to introduce a new language, since the sort of knowledge here in question has itself somewhat...