Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason

by Karl P. Ameriks

This seminal contribution to Kant studies, originally published in 1982, was the first to present a thorough survey and evaluation of Kant's theory of mind. Ameriks focuses on Kant's discussion of the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason , and examines how the themes raised there are treated in the rest of Kant's writings. Ameriks demonstrates that Kant developed a theory of mind that is much more rationalistic and defensible than most interpreters have allowed.

Genres: Philosophy

390 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 1982

About the author

Karl P. Ameriks was an American philosopher. He was the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

Reviews

[Dan DalMonte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karl Ameriks is the top American Kant scholar, in my view, and an interesting philosopher in his own right. In this book, he analyzes Kant's arguments in the Paralogisms section of the first Critique, in which Kant debunks certain rationalist dogmatism about the objective nature of the self. The fact that an "I think," i.e. a transcendental apperception that underlies every representation as a unifying condition of all thought, cannot be reified into a substance, is the center of the Paralogisms. We know something must exist, but we do not know its exact nature. The self may or may not be a substance, may or may not be simple, and may or may not be immortal. Especially interesting in this book is how Ameriks expresses the ideality of space and time as part of a species argument. Space and time are ideal insofar as there is a more fundamental viewpoint from which we can view things, i.e. one detached from the conditions of space and time. This is the divine viewpoint. Apperception does not constitute full cognition of the self, because it does not generate its own intuitions. Instead, we receive intuitions by being affected by ourselves, and these intuitions are in time as a non-essential property of the self that arises only in relation to a certain kind of perceiver. Kant's position is similar to McGinn's noumenalism about the self, although McGinn thinks that the deep levels of the self that we cannot know are nevertheless naturalistic, whereas Kant thinks that the self is ultimately immaterial.

[saml · Rating 2 out of 5]

very careful tracing of the lineages of immaterialism throughout kant's writing, and his precise views about the status of rational psychology. super impressive scholarship. unfortunately, blinkered as i am, this just prompts me to think that kant is not particularly valuable for his results