Tobias Rosefeldt

The paper tries to shed new exegetical light on Frege's "Dialogue with Pünjer on Existence" by showing that Pünjer's position in the dialogue is strongly inspired by Kantian claims about existence. It is argued that Pünjer's wavering between a broadly Meinongian and a broadly Fregean view on existence can be explained by the fact that there are Kantian remarks which seem to speak in favour of each of these views. A suggestion is then made how Kant's claims can be interpreted in such a way that the tension which they seem to entail disappears.

I argue that Patricia Kitcher's Kant-inspired account of self-consciousness overintellectualizes the requirements for rational cognition. Kitcher claims that a person can only believe something on the ground of another belief if she is able to recognize the grounding belief as grounding the first belief and as one of her own. I criticize this claim by arguing that (i) someone can believe something for a certain reason without recognizing this reason as a reason (the possibility of unreflected reasons), and that (ii) she can recognize something as a reason for something else without being able to self-ascribe either her original belief or the belief that grounds it (the possibility of reflected but not self-conscious reasons)