Kant's Theory of the Self by Melnick, Arthur;

Short description:

Melnick explains the "third status" of the self by identifying it with intellectual action that does not arise in the progression of attending (and so is not appearance), but accompanies and unifies inner attending. As so accompanying, it progresses with that attending and is therefore temporal--not a thing in itself.

Long description:

The self for Kant is something real, and yet is neither appearance nor thing in itself, but rather has some third status. Appearances for Kant arise in space and time where these are respectively forms of outer and inner attending (intuition). Melnick explains the "third status" by identifying the self with intellectual action that does not arise in the progression of attending (and so is not appearance), but accompanies and unifies inner attending. As so accompanying, it progresses with that attending and is therefore temporal--not a thing in itself. According to Melnick, the distinction between the self or the subject and its thoughts is a distinction wholly within intellectual action; only such a non-entitative view of the self is consistent with Kant’s transcendental idealism. As Melnick demonstrates in this volume, this conception of the self clarifies all of Kant’s main discussions of this issue in the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

"Melnick's book is rich as an interpretation of Kant, as a study of phenomenology, and as a fairly revisionary picture of metaphysics...Activity-based interpretations of Kant's view on the self have been suggested elsewhere by others, but none has been fleshed out in the way Melnick's is here. As Melnick shows, there are important reasons why such a reading of Kant is appealing, and any commentator wrestling with Kant's views on the self would do well to consider carefully Melnick's contribution to the literature." - Colin Marshall, New York University, USA

Table of Contents:

Preface

PART I: Preliminary Overview

Chapter One: The Reality of the Thinking Subject

Chapter Two: The Paralogisms and Transcendental Idealism

PART II: The Thinking Subject

Chapter Three: The First Paralogism

Chapter Four: The Second Paralogism

Chapter Five: Transcendental Self-Consciousness

Chapter Six: Other Interpretations of the Paralogisms

PART III: The Cognizing Subject

Chapter Seven: Empirical Apperception

Chapter Eight: Pure Apperception

PART IV: The Person as Subject

Chapter Nine: Apperception and Inner Sense

Chapter Ten: The Third Paralogism and Kant’s Conception of a Person

PART V: The Subject and Material Reality

Chapter Eleven: The Embodied Subject

Chapter Twleve: The Fourth Paralogism

Notes

Bibliography

Index