Understanding apperception today

Karl Ameriks

pp. 331-347

in: Paolo Parrini (ed), Kant and contemporary epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstrakt

Kant's theory of the mind has received considerable attention in the last decade, but most of the approaches of recent years can be seen as a resuscitation of strategies initiated by earlier generations of Kant scholars." For example, my own work in excavating the rationalist commitments that may remain intact behind Kant's critical arguments in the Paralogism has some obvious parallels with the "metaphysical" approach to Kant favored in the 1920s by German philosophers such as Heinz Heimsoeth, Max Wundt, and Martin Heidegger.² Yet another tradition, going back to Fichte, has been resurrected in our time by the influential work of Dieter Henrich³ and carried forward in an important new study by Frederick Neuhouser, whose focus on Fichte's concept of the self as 'self-positing" resembles notions recently said to be found in Kant by Henry Allison and Robert Pippin.⁴ These interpretations contrast with the standard analytic and anti-idealist approach represented most recently by C. T. Powell's new work," which can be seen as a development of suggestions by earlier English-speaking philosophers such as Peter Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars, and Jay Rosenberg. Similar but looser and more distant relations of indebtedness can be found between Patricia Kitcher's work⁶ and the Humean tradition, which has bequeathed a set of "naturalistic" problems and approaches, if not answers, to a line of interpreters that extends from Herbart to Robert Paul Wolff."

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Kant Immanuel

Fichte Johann Gottlieb

Heimsoeth Heinz

Henrich Dieter

Strawson Peter

Allison Henry

Sellars Wilfrid

Wolff Paul

Wolff Robert Paul