Steven Tester

Kant’s claim in the Subjective Deduction that we have multiple fundamental mental powers appears to be susceptible to some a priori metaphysical arguments made against multiple fundamental mental powers by Christian Wolff who held that these powers would violate the unity of thought and entail that the soul is an extended composite. I argue, however, that in the Second Paralogism and his lectures on metaphysics, Kant provides arguments that overcome these objections by showing that it is possible that a composite could ground the unity of thought, that properties are powers and therefore the soul could possess multiple powers, and the soul is a thing in itself so it cannot be an extended composite. These arguments lend additional support to the attribution of multiple mental powers to us in the Subjective Deduction.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is perhaps best known among English-speaking philosophers for his famous remark in which he suggests that on the basis of introspection we are warranted only in saying “it thinks,” or “thinking happens” instead of “I think.” In this and surrounding remarks, Lichtenberg criticizes rationalist metaphysics for positing a soul as a ground of our thoughts, perceptions, and representations and for claiming that personal identity consists in the persistence of this soul after the death of the body. In contrast with the rationalist metaphysics of the soul, he proposes a theory of the self according to which it is nothing more than a series of interconnected thoughts and representations..