Kant on the Nature of Inner Experience

Kantian Review, 2019

This paper advocates a new interpretation of inner experience – the experience that one has of one’s empirical-psychological features ‘from within’ – in Kant. It argues that for Kant inner experience is the empirical cognition of mental states, but not that of a persistent mental substance. The schema of persistence is thereby substituted with the regulative idea of the soul. This view is shown to be superior to two opposed interpretations: the parity view that regards inner experience as empirical cognition of a mental object on a par with outer experience and the disparity view that denies altogether that inner experience is empirical cognition.

Introduction to Book Manuscript

Philosophia, 2017

The issue of the nature of cognitive experience has been a subject of lively debate in recent works on epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. During this debate, the relevance of Kant to contemporary theories of cognition has been rediscovered. However, participants in this debate disagree whether Kant was a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist, with regard to the character of intuitions. The central point of controversy concerns whether or not Kant’s sensible intuitions involve understanding and have a conceptual content. In this paper, I show that, despite their disagreements, both sides share a number of common presuppositions, which have determined a biased framework for the reading of Kant. My principal aim in this article is to reconcile the case for conceptualism with those interpretations which argue that intentionality and conceptuality can be separated. To achieve it, I present my own reconstruction of Kant’s theory of cognition, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction, and offer a new interpretation of Kantian conceptualism.

Kant's Philosophy of the Unconscious, 2012

A question that has gone unasked for a long time in Kant research is whether and to what extent, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the central concept of apperception or the so-called transcendental or original selfconsciousness implies a form of concrete consciousness beyond purely formal and functional characteristics. It is thought to be entirely uncontroversial that that which produces objective knowledge and which Kant denoted with the concept of apperception only has transcendentally necessary significance and is entirely inaccessible to concrete consciousness. This deeply entrenched interpretation can be explained by programmatic reasons above all, whereby the lesson of the paralogisms chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason plays an important role. Here Kant shows that there can be no justification for assuming a Cartesian soul that would be accessible to knowledge. This can only make it seem substantially wrong-headed to wish to interpret the consciousness involved in apperception, which according to Kant underlies all structured thought, as a form of phenomenal consciousness that could somehow be made apparent from the first-person perspective. One could even argue that the very attempt to locate any phenomenal self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason is contrary to the entire project of the critique of knowledge, since Kant is concerned to justify propositional knowledge through conditions that are independent of experience and can be legitimately applied to the material of empirical intuition. This sort of approach necessitates a strict distinction in the theory between a priori structures on the one hand and empirical or psychological aspects of the consciousness of objects on the other hand-a distinction famously reflected in the Critique of Pure Reason in the sharp terminological oppositions of attributes such as "empirical" and "pure/transcendental", "a priori" and "a posteri-1 This paper was originally published in German in 2007 under the title "Vorbegriffliches Selbstbewusstsein bei Kant?". Translation by Karsten Schçllner.

Ergo, 2020

Does inner sense, like outer sense, provide inner sensations or, in other words, a sensory manifold of its own? Advocates of the disparity thesis on inner and outer sense claim that it does not. This interpretation, which is dominant in the preexisting literature, leads to several inconsistencies when applied to Kant’s doctrine of inner experience. Yet, while so, the parity thesis, which is the contrasting view, is also unable to provide a convincing interpretation of inner sensations. In this paper, I argue that this deadlock can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of inner sense shared by both sides. Drawing upon an analysis of the notion of obscure representations, I offer an alternative interpretation of inner sense with a special regard to self-affection, apprehension, and attention. From this basis, I will infer that outer sense delivers sensory content that is initially and intrinsically unaccompanied by phenomenal consciousness; inner sense contributes by endowing such content with phenomenal consciousness. Therefore, phenomenal qualities can be regarded as the sensory manifold of inner sense. This alternative interpretation solves the long-standing dispute concerning inner sensations and would further illuminate Kant’s notion of inner experience.

2015

2012

In order to secure the limits of the critical use of reason, and to succeed in the critique of speculative metaphysics, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had to present a full account of human cognitive experience. Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience is a detailed investigation of this aspect of Kant’s grand enterprise with a special focus: perception. The overarching goal is to understand this common phenomenon both in itself and as the key to understanding Kant’s views of experience. In the process, the author argues against any such reading of Kant that puts too much emphasis on concepts and understanding in perception. This means that claims of the sort that intuitions cannot play their role without concepts, that sensibility cannot bring anything to cognition without being mediated through the functions of understanding, or that there is no such thing as concept-independent perception, are shown to be either plainly false or misleading at best. Together with the contemporary topics examined by the end of the book, the findings suggest how the role of conceptual thinking in human cognition has been exaggerated partly because of a misplaced interpretation of Kant, which not only makes perception far more intellectual in character than what was intended by Kant himself, but distorts Kant’s account of cognition by overlooking what there is at the heart of his critical philosophy: the revaluation of sensible cognition.

in: P. Giordanetti et al. (Hg.) Kant's Philosophy of the Unconscious, Berlin/NewYork: de Gruyter, 131-146., 2012

A question that has gone unasked for a long time in Kant research is whether and to what extent, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the central concept of apperception or the so-called transcendental or original self-consciousness implies a form of concrete consciousness beyond purely formal and functional characteristics. It is thought to be entirely uncon-troversial that that which produces objective knowledge and which Kant denoted with the concept of apperception only has transcendentally necessary significance and is entirely inaccessible to concrete consciousness. This deeply entrenched interpretation can be explained by program-matic reasons above all, whereby the lesson of the paralogisms chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason plays an important role. Here Kant shows that there can be no justification for assuming a Cartesian soul that would be accessible to knowledge. This can only make it seem substantially wrong-headed to wish to interpret the consciousness involved in ap-perception, which according to Kant underlies all structured thought, as a form of phenomenal consciousness that could somehow be made apparent from the first-person perspective. One could even argue that the very attempt to locate any phenomenal self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason is contrary to the entire project of the critique of knowledge , since Kant is concerned to justify propositional knowledge through conditions that are independent of experience and can be legitimately applied to the material of empirical intuition. This sort of approach necessitates a strict distinction in the theory between a priori structures on the one hand and empirical or psychological aspects of the consciousness of objects on the other hand—a distinction famously reflected in the Critique of Pure Reason in the sharp terminological oppositions of attributes such as " empirical " and " pure/transcendental " , " a priori " and " a posteri

Journal of Philosophical Investigations, 18(47), 139-160. https://doi.org/10.22034/JPIUT.2024.61729.3770, 2024

This paper has the ambitious aim to clarify the putative different meanings of "consciousness" in Kant's Critique, particularly focusing on the concept of apperception. Often misinterpreted merely as the potential for self-attributions of experiences and mental states—technically, as the individual's ability to knowingly refer to himself—such readings overlook the pivot role of transcendental apperception in bridging the inherent gap between nonconceptual content of sensible intuitions and the higher-level conceptual content of propositional attitudes, essential for reasoning and the rational control of actions. In this context, "consciousness" or "self-consciousness" means cognitive accessibility (in Block's sense). But Kant's texts reveal additional meanings of consciousness. Notably, "sensation" means the raw material of intuition when it is apprehended through a synthesis of imagination without conceptual determination, capturing the subjective "what-it-is-like" phenomenal aspect of perception. Conversely, its objective correlate—the ability to discriminate and single out objects from their surroundings—embodies what can be described as "de re awareness" of a yet conceptually undetermined object of intuition.