Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism

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In Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism, Dennis Schulting examines the themes of reflexivity, self-consciousness, representation and apperception in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism more widely. Central to Schulting's argument is the claim that all of human experience is irreversibly self-referential and that this is part of a self-reflexivity, or what philosophers call transcendental apperception, a Kantian insight that was first apparent in the work of Christian Wolff and came to inform all of German Idealism. In a rigorous text suitable for students of German philosophy and upper-level students on metaphysics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, and aesthetics courses, the author establishes the historical roots of Kant's thought and traces it through to his immediate successors Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He specifically examines the cognitive role of self-consciousness and its relation to idealism and places it in a clear and coherent history of rationalist philosophy. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Preface Key to Abbreviations of Cited Primary Works 1 Introduction: Ineliminably Reflexive Human Experience 2 The ‘Self-Knowledge’ of Reason: Kant’s Copernican Hypothesis 2.1 Introduction: Kant’s Copernican Analogy 2.2 Perspectivism and the Copernican Analogy 2.3 Transcendental Reflection, ‘How Possible’-Questions and Kant’s ‘Alteration in Our Way of Thinking’ 2.4 Copernicus’s Hypothesis 2.5 Kant’s Veritable Copernicanism 2.6 ‘Forma dat esse rei’ 3 ‘A representation of my representations’: Apperception and the Leibnizian-Wolffian Background 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Apperception and Consciousness 3.3 Self-Consciousness in the Pre-Critical Kant and the Leibnizian-Wolffian Background 3.4 From the Metaphysik Herder to the Lectures from the Critical Period: A Developing Conception of Consciousness 3.5 Transcendental Apperception, Consciousness and Obscure Representations 4 Apperception, Self-Consciousness, and Self-Knowledge in Kant 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Self-Consciousness and Identity 4.3 Transcendental Apperception and Self-Consciousness 4.4 Self-Knowledge 5 Reflexivity, Intentionality, and Animal Perception 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Objectivity and Consciousness 5.3 Animal Perception and Spatial Determination 5.4 Concluding Remark: Either Objectivity or Immediacy 6 Disciple or Renegade? On Reinhold’s Representationalism, the Principle of Consciousness, and the Thing in Itself 6.1 ‘Nothing But Representations’ 6.2 Reinhold’s Representationalism 6.3 Reinhold’s Representationalism and the Thing in Itself 6.4 Kant, Reinhold, and the Radical Reading of the Ignorance Thesis 7 Apperception and Representational Content: Fichte, Hegel, and Pippin 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Distinguishability and Inseparability 7.3 The Short Argument to Inseparability 7.4 Inseparability and the Conclusion of the B-Deduction, Specifically, the B160 Note 7.5 Concluding Remarks 8 On the Kinship of Kant’s and Hegel’s Metaphysical Logics1 8.1 ‘Logic Thus Coincides With Metaphysics’ 8.2 General Logic and Transcendental Logic 8.3 Inseparability and Transcendental Content 8.4 No Need for a Transcendental Deduction? 8.5 Absolute Identity of Subject and Object 8.6 Concluding Remarks 9 Hegel, Transcendental Philosophy, and the Myth of Realism 9.1 Introduction: Hegel’s Supposed Naturalism 9.2 Category Theory and Epistemological Relativism 9.3 Is Hegel’s Metaphysics Pre-Kantian? 9.4 Metaphilosophy, Realism, and the Nature of Absolute Idealism 9.5 Concluding Remarks Notes Bibliography Index