-
70The Crucial Relation in Personal IdentityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 131-145. 1978.1. 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 s…Read more
-
15Connecting intuitions and concepts at b 160nSouthern Journal of Philosophy 25 (S1): 137-149. 1987.
-
10Empirical ConsciousnessIn Marcus Willaschek, Jürgen Stolzenberg, Georg Mohr & Stefano Bacin (eds.), Kant-Lexikon, De Gruyter. 2015.
-
1Kant’s philosophy of the cognitive mindIn Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 2006.
-
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.
-
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.
-
46Kant 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.
-
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
-
47Kant 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
-
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
-
33Review: Falkenstein, Lorne, Kant's Intuitionism (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 155-158. 1998.
-
33Natural 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
-
22Analyzing ApperceptionIn Udo Thiel & Gideon Stiening (eds.), Johann Nikolaus Tetens : Philosophie in der Tradition des Europäischen Empirismus, De Gruyter. pp. 103-132. 2014.
-
4Kant's real selfIn Allen W. Wood (ed.), Self and nature in Kant's philosophy, Cornell University Press. pp. 113--47. 1984.
-
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.
-
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.
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |