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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.
List 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
About the author
Arthur Melnick is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published several books on Kant’s philosophy including Space, Time, and Thought in Kant, and Themes in Kant’s Metaphysics and Ethics.
Summary
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.
