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70Henry E. Allison, "Kant's Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (3): 439. 1985.
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4Kant’s Intuitionism (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 155-158. 1998.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’ repre…Read more
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222Marr’s Computational Theory of VisionPhilosophy of Science 55 (March): 1-24. 1988.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 conside…Read more
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174Narrow taxonomy and wide functionalismPhilosophy of Science 52 (March): 78-97. 1985.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 tr…Read more
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152Kant on self-identityPhilosophical Review 91 (1): 41-72. 1982.Despite Kemp Smith's claims to the contrary, I show that there is good reason to believe that Kant was aware of Hume's attack on personal identity. My interpretive claim is that we can make sense of many of Kant's puzzling remarks in the subjective deduction by assuming that he was trying to reply to Hume's challenge. My substantive claim is that Kant succeeds in defending a notion of the self as a continuing sequence of informationally interdependent states.
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136Two normative roles for self-consciousness in modern philosophyIn Herbert S. Terrace & Janet Metcalfe (eds.), The Missing Link in Cognition: Origins of Self-Reflective Consciousness, Oxford University Press. pp. 174-187. 2005.
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47Kant and the MindPhilosophical Review 104 (4): 590. 1995.Consciousness, self-consciousness, mental unity, and the necessary conditions for cognition are issues of paramount importance for two prima facie distinct intellectual endeavors: contemporary cognitive science and interpretations of Kant. The goal of Andrew Brook’s timely and useful book is to contribute to both of these projects by showing how a better understanding of Kant’s views can also illuminate current controversies about how to model the mind.
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15On Interpreting Kant's Thinker as Wittgenstein's 'I'Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 33-63. 2000.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 n…Read more
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48Kant versus the Asymmetry DogmaKant Yearbook 5 (1). 2013.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 ha…Read more
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72Kant on the faculty of apperceptionBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (3): 589-616. 2017.Although I begin with a brief look at the idea that as a faculty of mind, apperception must be grounded in some power of the soul, my focus is on claims about the alleged noumenal import of some of Kant’s particular theses about the faculty of apperception: it is inexplicable, immaterial, and can provide evidence that humans are members of the intelligible world. I argue that when the claim of inexplicability is placed in the context of Kant’s standards for transcendental psychological explanati…Read more
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33Review: Falkenstein, Lorne, Kant's Intuitionism (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 155-158. 1998.
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4Kant's real selfIn Allen W. Wood (ed.), Self and nature in Kant's philosophy, Cornell University Press. pp. 113--47. 1984.
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34Natural Kinds and Unnatural PersonsPhilosophy 54 (210). 1979.Most people believe that extraterrestrial beings or porpoises or computers could someday be recognized as persons. Given the significant constitutional differences between these entities and ourselves, the general assumption appears to be that ‘person’ is not a natural kind term. David Wiggins offers an illuminating challenge to this popular dogma in ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind’. Wiggins does not claim that ‘person’ actually is a natural kind term; b…Read more
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22Analyzing ApperceptionIn Udo Thiel & Gideon Stiening (eds.), Johann Nikolaus Tetens : Philosophie in der Tradition des Europäischen Empirismus, De Gruyter. pp. 103-132. 2014.
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139Kant on self-consciousnessPhilosophical Review 108 (3): 345-386. 1999.The highest principle of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is that all cognition must “be combined in one single self-consciousness”. Elsewhere I have tried to explain why he believed that all cognition must belong to a single self ; here I try to clarify the other half of the doctrine. What led him to the claim that all cognition involved self-consciousness? This question is pressing, because the thesis strikes many as obviously false.
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47Triangulating phenomenal consciousnessBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 259-260. 1995.This commentary offers two criticisms of Block's account of phenomenal consciousness and a brief sketch of a rival account. The negative points are that monitoring consciousness also involves the possession of certain states and that phenomenal consciousness inevitably involves some sort of monitoring. My positive suggestion is that “phenomenal consciousness” may refer to our ability to monitor the rich but preconceptual states that retain perceptual information for complex processing.
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53Replies to Rödl, Ginsborg, and AllaisPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1): 237-247. 2013.
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |