Abstract
This chapter introduces the themes of the book, particular in respect of Kant’s representationalism and his thesis of the “radical faculty of cognition”, which relate to Kant’s subjectivism. Kant’s subjectivism is addressed with respect to four seminal strands of current research in Kant’s theoretical philosophy: (1) the role of self-consciousness in objective cognition, (2) perceptual knowledge of spatial objects, (3) nonconceptualism and (4) transcendental idealism. The central claim of the book is that in all of these strands Kant is shown to be a radical subjectivist regarding the possibility of knowledge, and that only reading Kant as a thoroughgoing subjectivist, in the Critical, non-reductive sense defined, saves TD from standard charges of incoherence, inconsistency, or relativism/scepticism: (1) Kantian subjectivity, in virtue of the principle of apperception or transcendental self-consciousness, is solely constitutive of the very conception of what an object is or what objectivity means, so that objective validity must be seen as intrinsic to thought itself; (2) Kantian subjectivity, in virtue of the principle of apperception, given sensory input, is solely constitutive of the possibility of perceiving objects as determinate spaces, without however thereby reducing space as infinite given magnitude to being the product of the understanding (contra an influential reading), which ties in with the fact that (3) not all mental content or intuition, in Kant’s terms, is dependent on the understanding, leaving room for ‘merely’ subjective representation or non-apperceptive consciousness or ‘blind’ intuition of spatial objects, i.e. minimally nonconceptual content; (4) our subjective conceptuality, not just the forms of our sensible intuition, already entails idealism about objects (contra a standard reading that the argument of TD can and must be seen separately from the doctrine of idealism) but does not run afoul of the absolute-idealist critique that Kantian ‘merely’ “subjective” idealism leads to scepticism (contra Hegelian appropriations).
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Schulting, D. (2017). Kant’s Radical Subjectivism: An Introductory Essay. In: Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43877-1_1
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