Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
- 2 Kant's theory of the subject
- 3 Kant's conception of awareness and self-awareness
- 4 Kant's theory of apperceptive self-awareness
- 5 The mind in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 6 The first-edition subjective deduction: the object of ‘one experience’
- 7 Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
- 8 The Third Paralogism: unity without identity over time
- 9 The second-edition subjective deduction: self-representing representations
- 10 Nature and awareness of the self
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
1 - The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
- 2 Kant's theory of the subject
- 3 Kant's conception of awareness and self-awareness
- 4 Kant's theory of apperceptive self-awareness
- 5 The mind in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 6 The first-edition subjective deduction: the object of ‘one experience’
- 7 Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
- 8 The Third Paralogism: unity without identity over time
- 9 The second-edition subjective deduction: self-representing representations
- 10 Nature and awareness of the self
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
Kant's contribution
There is a tendency to think of great philosophers of the past as cultural artefacts, intriguing and historically significant, perhaps, but long since superseded. In what must surely rank as one of the most patronizing comments in philosophy, William James expressed just that attitude toward Kant:
Kant's mind is the rarest and most intricate of all possible antique bric-a-brac museums, and connoisseurs and dilettanti will always wish to visit it and see the wondrous and racy contents. The temper of the dear old man about his work is perfectly delectable. And yet he is really … at bottom a mere curio, a ‘specimen’.
But some earlier philosophers are more than cultural artefacts. Even with all that has happened this century, some philosophers of past centuries continue to be fellow workers. We read these philosophers not just as an archaeological dig into our roots but to see what we can still learn from them. Kant is one of these philosophers.
At any rate, I think that is true of Kant's work on the mind. Given what has happened to epistemic foundations and the idea of necessary or a priori truth in the past few decades, it could be argued at least that Kant's epistemology is now merely a cultural artefact. In my view, that is not true of his work on the mind.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant and the Mind , pp. 1 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994