Corey W. Dyck

In the conclusion, the applicability of the foregoing account of illusion and error to the narrowly rationalistic psychologist, typically represented by Descartes and Leibniz, is considered. It is argued that this psychologist falls prey to illusion inasmuch as he overlooks the minimally empirical character of the consciousness of the existence of the I think, in contrast to the Wolffian’s inflation of this consciousness. It is further contended that Leibniz’s account of the soul is not comfortably characterized as narrowly rationalistic but instead bears an unmistakable resemblance to Wolff’s.

This chapter considers Kant’s discussion of reason’s use in guiding the investigation of inner appearances in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. Significantly, while Kant denies the pretensions of the rational psychologist to offer any cognition of the soul as such, Kant nonetheless allows that the rational psychologist can lay claim to cognitions of inner appearances. The ideas of reason, though illusory, serve an essential role in guiding the understanding and, as Kant demonstrates in the transcendental deduction of the idea of the soul, it can only fulfill this function insofar as it appears to be empirically given. This is illustrated through consideration of the only example Kant gives in the Appendix of the use of reason in the domain of psychology, namely, the investigation into the soul’s various forces and faculties.

The topic of Kant’s Fourth Paralogism, the ideality of external objects, is not a topic of rational psychology. Yet, as is contended in this chapter, Kant’s purpose in locating a discussion of idealism in the context of his criticism of rational psychology is to draw attention to the psychological ground for this philosophical position. Accordingly, Kant claims that it is the metaphysician’s assumption that (the I of) the I think is actually in time that leads him to ask whether the objects of outer sense are actually in space, and he consequently commits himself to idealism insofar as he finds reason to doubt the latter. At the root of this mistaken belief is the illusory appearance of the soul which Kant characterizes in terms of confusing the I think with the I am, a misidentification famously captured in, and apparently warranted by, Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum.

In this chapter, the topic of the Third Paralogism, the soul’s personality, is considered. Wolff’s views on personhood are shown to depart from Locke’s in that Wolff accords the human soul the status of personhood insofar as it has a capacity for a consciousness of its identity. Turning to subsequent discussions, especially by G. F. Meier and Moses Mendelssohn, it becomes evident that the issue of personality (and the related topic of immortality) took on increasing importance in spite of challenges to Wolff’s original presentation. Kant himself endorses the Wolffian account of the soul’s personality in the texts of the 1770s, and it is argued that Kant uses the Third Paralogism to dispute the way in which the Wolffian rational psychologist had presumed the soul is conscious of its numerical identity while admitting that there is an important sense in which the soul counts as a person.

In this chapter, the context of Kant’s Second Paralogism which concerns the simplicity of the soul is considered. Arguments for the soul’s immateriality within the Wolffian school are surveyed, revealing that the argument Kant designates as the Achilles of rational psychology is only introduced later by Knutzen as an improvement on Wolff’s original proof from motion. Kant’s discussions of the Achilles argument in the Nachlass from the 1770s show that Kant came to reject this proof and developed an alternative strategy that turned on the immediately intuited singularity of the I. In light of this context, the Second Paralogism is presented as a comprehensive criticism of these various arguments for the soul’s simplicity.

In this chapter, it is shown that Wolff’s conception of rational psychology was adopted and extended by his successors, including Baumgarten and Meier. Even staunch opponents, like Crusius, who went as far as to unceremoniously dismiss empirical psychology from among the proper subjects of metaphysics, nonetheless acknowledged the need to set out from a concept of the spirit acquired through observation. In addition to other relatively independent rationalist thinkers such as Mendelssohn, Lambert, and Tetens, it is demonstrated that Kant himself adopted such a conception of rational psychology, as is evident in his pre-Critical writings, handwritten Nachlass, and the student notes from his lectures on metaphysics.

In this chapter, it is argued that the key change between Kant’s pre-Critical and Critical conception of rational psychology consists in his account of the origin of the concept of the soul. Where he had formerly taken this concept to be reflected from experience, he now claims it is inferred from the pure I think. That the idea of the soul should have been mistaken for an empirical representation by Kant and the rational psychologist of the German tradition is consistent with Kant’s diagnosis of an illusion at the basis of the traditional rational psychologist’s claims, in accordance with which a merely formal representation is conflated with a perception. Moreover, this also serves to explain how that rational psychologist could be misled into conflating the distinct transcendental and empirical significations of the concept of substance in its application to the soul, an error which Kant exposes in the First Paralogism.

This chapter considers Wolff’s foundational account of rational psychology. Against the widespread characterization of Wolff’s rational psychology as narrowly rationalistic, it is shown that Wolff emphasizes the interdependence of empirical and rational psychology consistently throughout his German and Latin texts. The mixed character of Wolff’s rational psychology is a function of his distinctive rationalism which drew its inspiration from Leibniz but nevertheless actively sought to incorporate what it took to be the key insights of empiricist thinkers like Bacon, Newton, and especially Locke.

Is it possible to explain the existence of evil under the supposition of a supremely good creator? Are we ourselves the cause of most of the suffering that befalls us? Is life generally more painful than it is pleasant, and if so is non-existence preferable to existence? Is happiness ever even attainable? These questions occupied some of the best-known philosophers of the 17th to 19th centuries—figures such as G. W. Leibniz, Pierre Bayle, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. These questions were also richly discussed by writers often since excluded from the philosophical canon, such as Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Astell, and Olga Plumacher. For these thinkers, philosophy was not only a fair-weather friend; it was also a companion in storms and in darkness—it was a way of thinking about, thinking through, and contending with the profoundly unsettling. In this unique and provocative anthology, one will find philosophers bending their intellectual efforts to the darker side of life.

This article concerns a mysterious figure who is mentioned by Kant in the handwritten text that serves as the basis for his last published work, the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798. The name has been transcribed by the editor of the Akademie Ausgabe of the Anthropologie as ‘Morris Cangallerie,’ but I argue that this is a mistake. I proceed to offer my own alternative identification of the individual at issue, though this identification raises further questions about how Kant might be familiar with this figure and why he ultimately decided to remove the reference from the published text. Pursuing these questions takes us well beyond paleography into issues concerning Kant’s changing attitudes towards the Jewish people and religion, his careful curation of his own philosophical legacy, and even his late conception of the revolutionary character of his own philosophy.

Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany showcases the vibrant and diverse contributions on the part of women in eighteenth-century Germany and explores their under-appreciated influence upon philosophical debate in Germany in this period. Among the women profiled in this volume are Sophie of Hanover, Dorothea Christiane Erxleben, Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, Amalia Holst, Henriette Herz, Elise Reimarus, and Maria von Herbert. Their contributions span the range of philosophical topics in metaphysics, logic, and aesthetics, to moral and political philosophy, and pertain to the main philosophical movements in the period. They engage controversial issues of the day, such as atheism and materialism, but also women's struggle for access to education and for recognition of their civic entitlements, and they display a range of strategies for intellectual engagement in doing so. This collection vigorously contests the presumption that the history of German philosophy in the eighteenth century can be told without attending to the important roles that women played in the signature debates of the period.

Pedagogical texts represent an important but overlooked source for discerning and appreciating the philosophical views of women in the early modern period. In this chapter, I consider two representative cases taken from the vibrant Hamburg intellectual scene in the late 18th-century, namely, Elise Reimarus (1735–1805) and Amalia Holst (1758–1829). In the first section, I begin with a general overview of the interplay between philosophy and pedagogy throughout 18th century Germany, with particular focus on Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90). In the second section, I consider the pedagogical writings of Reimarus and show how through her pedagogical texts she advances a moderate enlightened agenda concerning a variety of philosophical topics, including God’s nature and attributes, the soul and its immortality, the nature of moral obligation, as well as woman’s vocation and the need for education. In the third section, I turn to Holst and contend that in her pedagogical texts she stakes out rather more radical positions on the same issues. In the end, I show that both Reimarus and Holst are excellent examples of how pedagogical texts became a means for women to engage with some of the most important and controversial philosophical discussions of their time.

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so is to overlook the distinctive rational psychology developed by Christian Wolff, which emphasized the empirical foundation of any rational cognition of the soul, and which was widely influential among eighteenth-century German philosophers, including Kant. In this book, Dyck reveals how the received conception of the aim and results of Kant's Paralogisms must be revised in light of a proper understanding of the rational psychology that is the most proximate target of Kant's attack. In particular, he contends that Kant's criticism hinges upon exposing the illusory basis of the rational psychologist's claims inasmuch as he falls prey to the appearance of the soul as being given in inner experience. Moreover, Dyck demonstrates that significant light can be shed on Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence by considering the Paralogisms in this historical context.Readership: Scholars and advanced students in history of philosophy, especially those working on Kant.

Considered in light of the reader’s expectation of a thoroughgoing criticism of the pretensions of the rational psychologist, and of the wealth of discussions available in the broader 18th century context, which includes a variety of proofs that do not explicitly turn on the identification of the soul as a simple substance, Kant’s discussion of immortality in the Paralogisms falls lamentably short. However, outside of the Paralogisms (and the published works generally), Kant had much more to say about the arguments for the soul’s immortality as he devoted considerable time to the topic throughout his career in his lectures on metaphysics. In fact, as I show in this paper, the student lecture notes prove to be an indispensable supplement to the treatment in the Paralogisms, not only for illuminating Kant’s criticism of the rational psychologist’s views on the immortality of the soul, but also in reconciling this criticism with Kant’s own positive claims regarding certain theoretical proofs of immortality.

Amalia Holst was an important pedagogical theorist and philosopher who was part of the distinctive intellectual milieu of Hamburg in the late 18th and early 19th century. Holst has enjoyed a fair amount of attention from scholars working on the history of feminism, and she has recently come to the attention of historians of philosophy for her incisive critique of (Rousseau-inspired) educational theories, her vocal advocacy for women’s access to higher education, and for apparently radical lines of thinking in her views on history, religion, and morality. While Holst was something of a public figure in Hamburg—she published two controversial treatises in her lifetime, in addition to a lengthy review of a popular novel—there is relatively little known about her life, with most of what we do know owed to only a sparse handful of sources. It is, therefore, a rather significant development for scholars working on Holst that two letters by her should come to light. These letters are replete with new details of Holst’s life, her intellectual network, and they seem to have been wholly unaccounted for by Holst’s biographers. In this article, I will provide a transcription and translation, with annotations, of the two new letters.

In 1794, Michael Wenzel Voigt, a professor of rhetoric in present-day Czechia, published the first German translation of Aristotle’s De anima. Voigt’s translation was explicitly intended to rescue Aristotle's views on the soul, and the bold strategy he adopts towards this end is to assert a direct connection between Aristotle’s doctrines and Kant’s Critical philosophy. Thus, he contends that Aristotle’s books on the soul can be read as an “appendix” or even as a “propadeutic” to Kant’s Critical works. Despite Voigt’s rather hamfisted attempt to establish this connection, the conjecture at the core of his project—that a number of key Kantian claims about the mind or soul have a largely overlooked Aristotelian provenance—turns out to be correct, or so I argue in this chapter. Even so, we will see that this connection is not direct but is instead mediated by the reception of Aristotle in the late 17th and early 18th century. Moreover, it is not limited to the views Aristotle expresses in his texts on the soul but extends beyond his psychological and even metaphysical works to include views expressed in his logical and ethical thought.

In this paper, we reconstruct Kant’s notion of the practically conditioned, introduced in the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, by drawing on Kant’s general account of the faculty of reason presented in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. We argue that practical reason’s activity of seeking the practically unconditioned for a given condition generates two different conceptions of the practically unconditioned and identify these as virtue and (the ideal of) happiness. We then account for how and why reason proceeds to combine these two distinct ideas into the composite idea of the highest good. Last, we draw on our discussion to determine more precisely what Kant intends by the ‘supremacy’ of virtue within reason’s idea of the highest good.

When attempting to capture the concept of enlightenment that underlies and motivates philosophical (and political and scientific) developments in the 18th century, historians of philosophy frequently rely upon a needlessly but intentionally exclusive account. This, namely, is the conception of enlightenment first proposed by Kant in his famous essay of 1784, which takes enlightenment to consist in the “emergence from the self-imposed state of minority” and which is only possible for a “public” to attain as a result of the public use of reason, a privilege enjoyed by citizens and exemplified in the activity of the scholar. That women, among other groups, did not hold the status of citizens and did not enjoy access to the institutions or training that might gain them recognition as scholars is apparently not a concern for Kant, as he notes that the enlightened condition is likely out of reach anyway for “by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex)” (AA 8:35). This naturally leads one to wonder what a history of this period could look like when considered from the perspective of a different, more inclusive conception of enlightenment, and in this chapter I propose to conduct an experiment of sorts just along these lines. As opposed to Kant’s exclusionary conception, I will instead take that proposed by his distinguished contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, as my starting point. In addition to offering a conception of enlightenment distinctive both for its wide scope and progressive character, Mendelssohn’s has the advantage, or so I will show, of bringing the manifold intellectual contributions of a diverse set of women into focus, though it does more than this in that it also reveals these women to actively and critically engage with key aspects of Mendelssohn’s and others’ philosophical views.

Kant's A-Edition objective deduction is naturally (and has traditionally been) divided into two arguments: an " argument from above" and one that proceeds " von unten auf." This would suggest a picture of Kant's procedure in the objective deduction as first descending and ascending the same ladder, the better, perhaps, to test its durability or to thoroughly convince the reader of its soundness. There are obvious obstacles to such a reading, however; and in this chapter I will argue that the arguments from above and below constitute different, albeit importantly inter-related, proofs. Rather than drawing on the differences in their premises, however, I will highlight what I take to be the different concerns addressed and, correspondingly, the distinct conclusions reached by each. In particular, I will show that both arguments can be understood to address distinct specters, with the argument from above addressing an internal concern generated by Kant’s own transcendental idealism, and the argument from below seeking to dispel a more traditional, broadly Humean challenge to the understanding’s role in experience. These distinct concerns also imply that these arguments yield distinct conclusions, though I will show that they are in fact complementary.

In 1802, Amalia Holst (1758–1829) published a text entitled Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung (On Woman’s Vocation to a higher Education of the Mind). In this lengthy and meticulously argued treatise, Holst engages in a vigorous rebuttal of Rousseau-inspired justifications for obstructing women’s access to education and, positively, connects women’s right to education to the traditional conception of woman’s vocation. While the text was, unsurprisingly, the object of a hostile reception in its own time, there are features of Holst’s argument that continue to complicate its reception within the history of philosophical feminism today.