Falk Wunderlich

Kant and the scientific study of consciousness

We argue that Kant’s views about consciousness, the mind—body problem and the status of psychology as a science all differ drastically from the way in which these topics are conjoined in present debates about the prominent idea of a science of consciousness. Kant never used the concept of consciousness in the now dominant sense of phenomenal qualia; his discussions of the mind—body problem center not on the reducibility of mental properties but of substances; and his views about the possibility of psychology as a science did not employ the requirement of a mechanistic explanation, but of a quantification of phenomena. This shows strikingly how deeply philosophical problems and conceptions can change even if they look similar on the surface.

Kant’s Second Paralogism in Context

It was Kant’s major aim to provide in his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) a novel and systematic account of almost all fields of theoretical philosophy, and so he did little to indicate anything of the contemporary debates from which his ideas sprang. Some of this context is of course well known, like the opposition between rationalism and empirism, or the contemporary import of Humean scepticism. In the first edition (1781) of the CPR (A redaction), in the chapter on the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason, ” the second paralogism forms, however, an important exception in this regard, and it seems that former commentators have not taken this into sufficient consideration. It is my main thesis that this section offers an opportunity to expose Kant’s relation to contemporary debates in a far more definite way. To be sure, these relations are not overt and thus rest also on reconstruction. So I will give first a detailed analysis of the second paralogism and then turn to the contemporary context.

Bundles, Selves, and Sceptical Realism in Udo Thiel’s The Early Modern Subject

Abstract: This paper deals with how to understand David Hume’s theory of personal identity. Udo Thiel endorses a view that resembles the Sceptical Realist interpretation to some extent while taking issue with its ontological implications. Thiel argues that Hume’s so-called bundle theory of the mind is not a theory about its real essence but rather only a theory about our idea of the self. Thiel thus argues for an epistemological reading of the bundle theory and rejects the mainstream reading as unjustifiably ontological. In this paper, I challenge Thiel’s view by discussing some textual and philosophical evidence against it.

The Nature of the ‘I Think’: Comments on Chapter 11 of Kant's Thinker

The article deals with Kants theory of the self in Patricia Kitchers Kants Thinker in three respects: (1) I argue that it is doubtful whether accompanying representations with the ‘I think’ as such yields a principle for the categories since it does not require any strong kind of connection between them. (2) I discuss textual evidence for and against Kitchers attempt to make sense of Kants claim that the ‘I think’ requires the continued existence of cognizers per se . (3) I ask whether Kitchers understanding of Kants positive theory of the self leans towards minimal substantialism or towards functionalism.