Patricia Kitcher

Wonderfully clear, scholarly, and well argued, Kant’s Intuitionism offers a bold new interpretation of the thesis of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Falkenstein reads Kant as a “formal intuitionist.” That is, he takes Kant to have maintained that the forms of intuition, space, and time were given along with sensations. They were neither preexisting representations, nor intellectual or imaginative constructions out of sensations. In this context “given” contrasts with “constructed”; subjects’ representations of space and time derived from their sensory constitutions. When subjects’ senses were stimulated, that produced sensations with intensities varying according to the stimulus; because of the subjects’ constitutions, the intensity values were ordered after one another in time and adjacent to one another in space. Falkenstein characterizes space and time as “presentational orders” of sensations.

David Marr's theory of vision has been widely cited by philosophers and psychologists. I have three projects in this paper. First, I try to offer a perspicuous characterization of Marr's theory. Next, I consider the implications of Marr's work for some currently popular philosophies of psychology, specifically, the "hegemony of neurophysiology view", the theories of Jerry Fodor, Daniel Dennett, and Stephen Stich, and the view that perception is permeated by belief. In the last section, I consider what the phenomenon of vision must be like for Marr's project to succeed

Three recent, influential critiques (Stich 1978; Fodor 1981c; Block 1980) have argued that various tasks on the agenda for computational psychology put conflicting pressures on its theoretical constructs. Unless something is done, the inevitable result will be confusion or outright incoherence. Stich, Fodor, and Block present different versions of this worry and each proposes a different remedy. Stich wants the central notion of belief to be jettisoned if it cannot be shown to be sound. Fodor tries to reduce confusion in computational psychology by dismissing some putative tasks as impossible. Block argues that the widespread faith in functionalism is just not warranted. I argue that all these critiques are misguided because they depend on holding cognitive psychology to taxonomic standards that other sciences routinely rise above

Although both Kant and Wittgenstein made claims about the “unknowability” of cognitive subjects, the current practice of assimilating their positions is mistaken. I argue that Allison’s attempt to understand the Kantian self through the early Wittgenstein and McDowell’s linking of Kant and the later Wittgenstein distort rather than illuminate. Against McDowell, I argue further that the Critique’s analysis of the necessary conditions for cognition produces an account of the sources of epistemic nonnativity that is importantly different from McDowell’s own account in terms of a ‘second nature’ created through ‘Bildung’. Finally, I argue that Kant’s epistemic analyses also lead to a model of the cognitive self that answers two contemporary questions: why should we refer to selves at all? in what dies the unity of a subject of thought consist?

Kant's discussion of the relations between cognition and self-consciousness lie at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason, in the celebrated transcendental deduction. Although this section of Kant's masterpiece is widely believed to contain important insights into cognition and self-consciousness, it has long been viewed as unusually obscure. Many philosophers have tried to avoid the transcendental psychology that Kant employed. By contrast, Patricia Kitcher follows Kant's careful delineation of the necessary conditions for knowledge and his intricate argument that knowledge requires self-consciousness. She argues that far from being an exercise in armchair psychology, the thesis that thinkers must be aware of the connections among their mental states offers an astute analysis of the requirements of rational thought.The book opens by situating Kant's theories in the then contemporary debates about "apperception," personal identity and the relations between object cognition and self-consciousness. After laying out Kant's argument that the distinctive kind of knowledge that humans have requires a unified self- consciousness, Kitcher considers the implications of his theory for current problems in the philosophy of mind. If Kant is right that rational cognition requires acts of thought that are at least implicitly conscious, then theories of consciousness face a second "hard problem" beyond the familiar difficulties with the qualities of sensations. How is conscious reasoning to be understood? Kitcher shows that current accounts of the self-ascription of belief have great trouble in explaining the case where subjects know their reasons for the belief. She presents a "new" Kantian approach to handling this problem. In this way, the book reveals Kant as a thinker of great relevance to contemporary philosophy, one whose allegedly obscure achievements provide solutions to problems that are still with us

1. What is the Problem of Personal Identity?Locke posed the problem of personal identity in one brief question, “What makes the same person?” This formulation is deceptively simple. My aim is to offer a new interpretation of the problem and to suggest a method for finding a solution.Investigations of personal identity are usually cast in terms of finding the criterion for personal identity. Yet talk of criteria is ambiguous. In one sense of the term, the criterion of personal identity would be special evidence for personal identity. According to the second usage, the criterion of personal identity would be that state of affairs for which evidence for personal identity is evidence. We will not be concerned with the first construal. On that reading, the problem of personal identity would be an epistemological issue. But the basic question concerning personal identity, “What is one person?” does not appear to be an epistemological question.

Although both Kant and Wittgenstein made claims about the "unknowability" of cognitive subjects, the current practice of assimilating their positions is mistaken. I argue that Allison's attempt to understand the Kantian self through the early Wittgenstein and McDowell's linking of Kant and the later Wittgenstein distort rather than illuminate. Against McDowell, I argue further that the Critique's analysis of the necessary conditions for cognition produces an account of the sources of epistemic normativity that is importantly different from McDowell's own account in terms of a `second nature' created through `Bildung'. Finally, I argue that Kant's epistemic analyses also lead to a model of the cognitive self that answers two contemporary questions: why should we refer to selves at all? in what dies the unity of a subject of thought consist?

One of the most widely accepted contemporary constraints on theories of self-knowledge is that they must account for the very different ways in which cognitive subjects know their own minds and the ways in which they know other minds. Through the influence of Peter Strawson, Kant is often taken to be an original source for this view. I argue that Kant is quite explicit in holding the opposite position. In a little discussed passage in the Paralogisms chapter, he argues that cognitive subjects have no way of understanding the minds of others except by using their own minds as a model for others.