1st Edition
Transparency and Apperception Exploring the Kantian Roots of a Contemporary Debate
Transparency and Apperception: Exploring the Kantian Roots of a Contemporary Debate explores the links between the idea that belief is transparent and Kant’s claims about apperception.
Transparency is the idea that a person can answer questions about whether she, for instance, believes something by considering, not her own psychological states, but the objects and properties the belief is about. This marks a sharp contrast between a first-person and third-person perspective on one’s current mental states. This idea has deep roots in Kant’s doctrine of apperception, the claim that the human mind is essentially self-conscious, and Kant held that it underlies the responsibility that a person has for certain of their own mental states. Nevertheless, the idea of transparency and its roots in apperception remain obscure and give rise to difficult methodological and exegetical questions. The contributions in this work address these questions and will be required reading for anyone working on this intersection of the philosophy of mind and language, and epistemology.
The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
1. Assertion and transparent self-knowledge
Eric Marcus and John Schwenkler
2. Kant and the transparency of the mind
Alexandra M. Newton
3. The puzzle of transparency and how to solve it
Wolfgang Barz
4. Spontaneity and Self-Consciousness in the Groundwork and the B-Critique
Yoon Choi
5. ‘I do not cognize myself through being conscious of myself as thinking’: Self-knowledge and the irreducibility of self-objectification in Kant
Thomas Khurana
6. Kant’s "I think" and the agential approach to self-knowledge
Houston Smit
7. Transparency and reflection
Matthew Boyle
Biography
Boris Hennig, David Hunter and Thomas Land are faculty members in the Philosophy Department at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.