Kant and the Mind

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

Andrew Brook (Author)

9780521574419, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 April 1997

344 pages
23 x 15.4 x 1.9 cm, 0.479 kg

' … novel ideas on important topics, forcefully presented so they cannot be disregarded.' Mind

Kant made a number of highly original discoveries about the mind - about its ability to synthesise a single, coherent representation of self and world, about the unity it must have to do so, and about the mind's awareness of itself and the semantic apparatus it uses to achieve this awareness. The past fifty years have seen intense activity in research on human cognition. Even so, Kant's discoveries have not been superseded, and some of them have not even been assimilated into current thinking. That is particularly true of his work on unity and on the semantic apparatus of self-awareness. The first four chapters of this book present a comprehensive overview of Kant's model for non-specialists, an overview largely unencumbered by detailed exegesis. The work then offers a close study of five major discussions of the mind in the Critique of Pure Reason and Anthropology.

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.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]