Jens Pier

In recent years, renewed attention has been paid to Kant’s concern with capacities and faculties of the mind. His critical philosophy is frequently characterized as a “capacity-first philosophy” or “capacitism.” A common feature of these characterizations is that they frame this feature as a matter of optional choice or theory design. This paper also characterizes Kant’s philosophy as capacitism, though I argue that, firstly, he ultimately focuses on but one single capacity—self-consciousness or apperception. Secondly, I resist the idea that this focus should fundamentally be seen as a matter of metaphilosophical choice or design. It is rather an articulation or explication of something non-optional: on my interpretation, Kant’s capacitism brings out and makes explicit apperception as the starting point and principle of transcendental philosophy. It occupies this principal position because it is the constitutive human faculty: the faculty in light of which all other faculties must be made sense of. I further argue that judgment or the “I think” is the paradigmatic act of this capacity, and suggest that ultimately, apperception ought to be regarded as identical to human spontaneity in general. Kant’s philosophy should thus be characterized as an apperception-first philosophy.

What bearing does human self-consciousness have on questions in metaphysics and philosophical methodology? “Articulated Unity: Kant’s Philosophy of Self-Consciousness as Critical Metaphysics” argues that Kant gives an ingenious and radical answer: the philosophy of self-consciousness and metaphysics are one and the same—insofar as metaphysics becomes critical. In developing this insight, Kant also brings out the underlying unity of two methodological approaches now often taken to be at odds: his articulated unity of the apperceptive-receptive faculty of cognition, in which all thought and all metaphysics are rooted, is at once systematic and diagnostic. From this idea of articulated unity, we can gain a vision of philosophical thinking about finitude, reason, pure concepts, transcendental idealism, the limits of intelligibility, divine transcendence, and the human standpoint. The book develops this conception of philosophy by way of engaging with Kant scholarship, analytic metaphysics and metaphilosophy, Wittgensteinianism, and neo-Hegelianism.

The legacy of the Platonic dialogues may well lie, not in any classical idealist “doctrine of forms,” but in an inquisitive stance towards the puzzle behind any such doctrine—how thought can be about anything at all. This Platonic puzzle may, however, yield a different guise of idealism that is recognizably diagnostic: it aims to dispel our worry about thought’s objectivity as a confusion, engendered by a self-alienation of thought. These themes of diagnosis and idealism resurface in Wittgenstein, who in his treatment of rules calls for an understanding of thought’s normativity from within. This is taken up by Cora Diamond, who urges philosophy to attend to thought’s real needs by exorcizing any desire for agreement with something other than itself. I argue that Wittgenstein and Diamond lead us back to Kant’s idealism, which identifies transcendental realism as the deep-seated prejudice at the root of the puzzle.