Abstract
This paper relates Kant’s account of pure apperception to the agential approach to self-knowledge. It argues that his famous claim ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my representations’ (B131) does not concern the possibility of self-ascribing beliefs. Kant does advance this claim in the service of identifying an a priori warrant we have as psychological persons, that is, subjects of acts of thinking that are imputable to us. But this warrant is not one to self-knowledge that we have as critical reasoners. It is, rather, an a priori warrant we have, as thinkers, to prescribe to given representations their conformity to principles of thinking inherent in our capacity of understanding itself.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 980-1011 |
Number of pages | 32 |
Journal | Canadian Journal of Philosophy |
Volume | 49 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 3 2019 |
Keywords
- apperception
- person
- principles of thinking
- self-consciousness
- Self-knowledge
- transcendental deduction of the categories
- understanding
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Philosophy