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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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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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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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117On Interpreting Kant’s Thinker as Wittgenstein’s ‘I’Philosophy 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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116Kant's Transcendental PsychologyOup Usa. 1990.In this innovative study Patricia Kitcher argues that we can only understand the deduction of the categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of his attempt to fathom the psychological prerequisites of thought. Thus a consideration of his conception of psychology is essential to an understanding of his philosophy. Kitcher specifically considers Kant's claims about the unity of the thinking self; the spatial forms of human perceptions; the relations among mental states necessary for the…Read more
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98Kant's thinkerOxford University Press. 2011.Overview -- Locke's internal sense and Kant's changing views -- Personal identity amd its problems -- Rationalist metaphysics of mind -- Consciousness, self-consciousness, and cognition -- Strands of Argument in the Duisburg Nachlass -- A transcendental deduction for a priori concepts -- Synthesis : why and how? -- Arguing for apperception -- The power of apperception -- "I-think" as the destroyer of rational psychology -- Is Kant's theory consistent? -- The normativity objection -- Is Kant's th…Read more
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80A Kantian Argument for the Formula of HumanityKant Studien 108 (2): 218-246. 2017.Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 2 Seiten: 218-246.
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79Recent Books on Kant: Kant's Theory of Imagination; Kant and the Experience of Freedom; Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World; Dignity and Practical Reason; Immanuel Kant; Kant's Compatibilism; Kant's Transcendental Psychology; The Unity of Reason; Kant's Theory of Justice (review)Philosophical Quarterly 46 (183): 226. 1996.
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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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70Kant's epistemological problem and its coherent solutionPhilosophical Perspectives 13 415-441. 1999.
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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
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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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62Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 155. 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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55Connecting intuitions and concepts at B 160nSouthern Journal of Philosophy 25 (S1): 137-149. 1987.
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53«Kant's Thinker». An ExpositionRivista di Filosofia 104 (1): 24-50. 2013.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 …Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |