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An Overview of Sigmund Freud's Theories

How the Father of Psychology Came to Be

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Library of Congress / Contributor / Getty Images 

• Talk Therapy
• Personality
• Psychosexual Development
• Dream Analysis
• Defense Mechanisms
• Female Psychology

Frequently Asked Questions

If you've ever taken or are currently taking psychology, chances are that you've spent a fair amount of time learning about Sigmund Freud's theory. Even those outside the psychology field often have some awareness of Freudian psychoanalysis, the school of thought created by Sigmund Freud.

In simple terms, Freud's theory suggests that human behavior is influenced by unconscious memories, thoughts, and urges. This theory also proposes that the psyche comprises three aspects: the id, ego, and superego . The id is entirely unconscious, while the ego operates in the conscious mind. The superego operates both unconsciously and consciously.

Knowing more about Freudian psychology, along with the key concepts in psychoanalysis—like the unconscious, fixations, defense mechanisms , and dream symbols —can help you understand the influence Freud's theories have had on contemporary psychologists .

Click Play to Learn More About Sigmund Freud's Theories

This video has been medically reviewed by Daniel B. Block, MD .

In this brief overview of Freudian theory, learn more about some of the major ideas proposed by Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud's Theory of Talk Therapy

One of Freud's greatest contributions to psychology was talk therapy , the notion that simply talking about problems can help alleviate them. It was through his association with his close friend and colleague Josef Breuer that Freud became aware of a woman known in the case history as Anna O .

The young woman's real name was Bertha Pappenheim. She became a patient of Breuer's after suffering a bout of what was then known as hysteria . Symptoms included blurred vision, hallucinations, and partial paralysis.

Breuer observed that discussing her experiences provided some relief from her symptoms. It was Pappenheim herself who began referring to the treatment as the "talking cure."

While Anna O. is often described as one of Freud's patients, the two never actually met. Freud often discussed her case with Breuer, however, and the two collaborated on an 1895 book based on her treatment titled Studies in Hysteria .

Freud concluded that her hysteria was the result of childhood sexual abuse , a view that ended up leading to a rift in Freud and Breuer's professional and personal relationship. Anna O. may not have actually been Freud's patient, but her case informed much of Freud's work and later theories on therapy and psychoanalysis .

Freud's Theory of Personality

According to Freud's theory, there are a few different factors that affect personality. They include cathexis and anticathexis, along with life and death instincts.

Cathexis and Anticathexis

According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory, all psychic energy is generated by libido . Freud suggested that our mental states were influenced by two competing forces: cathexis and anticathexis .

• Cathexis was described as an investment of mental energy in a person, idea, or object.
• Anticathexis involves the ego blocking the socially unacceptable needs of the id. Repressing urges and desires is one common form of anticathexis, but this involves a significant investment of energy.

If you are hungry, for example, you might create a mental image of a delicious meal that you have been craving. In other cases, the ego might harness some energy from the id (the primitive mind) to seek out activities related to the desire in order to disperse excess energy from the id.

Sticking with the same example, if you can't actually seek out food to appease your hunger, you might instead thumb through a cookbook or browse through your favorite recipe blog.

According to Freud's theory, there is only so much libidinal energy available. When a lot of energy is devoted to suppressing urges via anticathexis, there is less energy for other processes.

Life Instincts and Death Instincts

Freud also believed that much of human behavior was motivated by two driving instincts: life instincts and death instincts .

• Life instincts (Eros) are those that relate to a basic need for survival, reproduction, and pleasure. They include such things as the need for food, shelter, love, and sex.
• Death instincts (Thanatos) are the result of an unconscious wish for death, which Freud believed all humans have. Self-destructive behavior was one expression of the death drive, according to Freud. However, he believed that these death instincts were largely tempered by life instincts.

Sigmund Freud's Theory of the Psyche

In Freudian theory, the human mind is structured into two main parts: the conscious and unconscious mind .

• The conscious mind includes all the things we are aware of or can easily bring into awareness.
• The unconscious mind , on the other hand, includes all of the things outside of our awareness—all of the wishes, desires, hopes, urges, and memories that we aren't aware of yet continue to influence behavior.

Freudian psychology compares the mind to an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg that is actually visible above the water represents just a tiny portion of the mind. On the other hand, the huge expanse of ice hidden underneath the water represents the much larger unconscious.

There is some question as to whether the iceberg metaphor came from Freud himself or one of his biographers, as some researchers indicate that there was no mention of an iceberg in Freud's writings.

In addition to these two main components of the mind, Freudian theory also divides human personality into three major components: the id, ego, and superego .

• The id is the most primitive part of the personality that is the source of all our most basic urges. The id is entirely unconscious and serves as the source of all libidinal energy.
• The ego is the component of personality that deals with reality and helps ensure that the demands of the id are satisfied in ways that are realistic, safe, and socially acceptable.
• The superego is the part of the personality that holds all of the internalized morals and standards that we acquire from our parents, family, and society at large.

Freud's Theory of Psychosexual Development

Freudian theory suggests that as children develop, they progress through a series of psychosexual stages . At each stage, the libido's pleasure-seeking energy is focused on a different part of the body.

The five stages of psychosexual development are:

• The oral stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the mouth.
• The anal stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the anus.
• The phallic stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the penis or clitoris.
• The latent stage : A period of calm in which little libidinal interest is present.
• The genital stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the genitals.

The successful completion of each stage leads to a healthy personality as an adult. If, however, a conflict remains unresolved at any particular stage, the individual might remain fixated or stuck at that particular point of development.

A fixation can involve an over-dependence or obsession with something related to that phase of development. For example, a person with an "oral fixation" is believed to be stuck at the oral stage of development. Signs of an oral fixation might include excessive reliance on oral behaviors such as smoking, biting fingernails, or eating.

Freud's Theory of Dream Analysis

The unconscious mind played a critical role in all of Freud's theories, and he considered dreams to be one of the key ways to take a peek into what lies outside our conscious awareness.

He dubbed dreams "the royal road to the unconscious" and believed that by examining dreams, he could see not only how the unconscious mind works but also what it is trying to hide from conscious awareness.

Freud believed the content of dreams could be broken down into two different types:

• The manifest content of a dream included all the actual content of the dream—the events, images, and thoughts contained within the dream. The manifest content is essentially what the dreamer remembers upon waking.
• The latent content , on the other hand, is all the hidden and symbolic meanings within the dream. Freud believed that dreams were essentially a form of wish fulfillment. By taking unconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires and transforming them into less threatening forms, people are able to reduce the ego's anxiety.

Freud often utilized the analysis of dreams as a starting point in his free association technique. When working with a client, he would focus on a particular dream symbol, then use free association to see what other thoughts and images immediately came to the client's mind.

Freud's Theory of Defense Mechanisms

Even if you've never studied Freud's theories before, you have probably heard the term "defense mechanisms." When someone seems unwilling to face a painful truth, you might accuse them of being " in denial ." If they try to look for a logical explanation for unacceptable behavior, you might suggest that they are "rationalizing."

For instance, rationalizations for smoking might include "one cigarette won't hurt me" or "if I quit, I'll just gain weight."

Denial and rationalization represent different types of defense mechanisms, or tactics that the ego uses to protect itself from anxiety. Some of the best-known mechanisms of defense include denial, repression , and regression , but there are many more.

Freud's Theory of Female Psychology

Freud's perspective on women was, and continues to be, one of his most controversial. One of his theories relating to female psychology is known as the Electra complex, also sometimes referred to as penis envy.

According to Freud, females start out close to their mothers. But once they realize they don't have a penis, they start to hate their moms for mutilating them, then become close to their dad. At the same time, females start to imitate their mom because they fear the loss of her affection.

The Electra complex is the opposite of the Oedipus complex , which Freud contended is when a male child develops a sexual attachment to his mother, viewing his father as a sexual rival.

Freud's Theory of Religion

Freud theorized that religious beliefs are essentially delusions, and also that turning away from these types of ideologies is preferable because religion does not lead to happiness and fulfillment; in fact, it is a belief structure not based on evidence.

Freud felt that a person's religious views were, at least in part, a result of their relationship with their father. He believed that people tend to depict their idea of a "God" based on the qualities and traits of the father figure in their life and that these qualities changed as their relationship with their father changed.

It is believed that Freud's theory of religion was influenced by his relationship with his own father. Freud had a Jewish upbringing, which he said he had no desire to change, yet he also stated that he was "completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion."

Impact of Freudian Theory

While Freud's theories have been widely criticized, they are still important because his work has made contributions to psychology as we know it today.

Psychotherapy

Many contemporary psychologists do not give credence to Freud's ideas, but the theories remain important. And research has validated the effectiveness of various forms of talk therapy, such as one finding that psychodynamic therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy were both effective for treating anxiety in college-age students. Freud's belief that mental problems could be resolved by actually talking about them helped revolutionize psychotherapy.

When the patient and analyst are well suited to work together, they can see how the patient's past gets reactivated in their current therapy and much learning takes place.

Freud's theories have also sparked a major change in how we view mental illness by suggesting that not all psychological problems have physiological causes.

Freud's contributions have also impacted the foundational science of what we know about psychology today. His idea that our thoughts are largely unconscious has withstood scientific scrutiny, for instance, retaining their importance in understanding human development and behavior.

Freud has even influenced thoughts about how society has formed into what it is today. Some believe that his theories help explain some of the successes of modern society while also explaining some of its failures.

Final Thoughts

To understand where psychology is today, it is essential to take a look at where we've been and how we got here. Freud's work provides insight into an important movement in psychology that helped transform how we think about mental health and how we approach psychological disorders .

By studying Freud's theories and those that came after, you gain a better understanding of psychology's fascinating history. Many terms such as defense mechanism , Freudian slip , and anal retentive have become a part of our everyday language. By learning about his work and theories, you can understand how these ideas and concepts became woven into the fabric of popular culture.

After starting his career as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital, Freud entered private practice, specializing in the treatment of psychological disorders. It was during this time in private practice that Freud started to develop his theories.

These theories were later refined through Freud's associations with Josef Breuer, a colleague and friend who was treating a patient with hysteria. Based on this case, Freud developed the theory that many neuroses originate from trauma that has transitioned from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind.

While Freud's psychosexual theory is rooted in basic needs and physiological driving forces, Erikson's psychosocial theory places more emphasis on one's environment.

Erikson's and Freud's theories also vary in terms of stages of development. For instance, the first stage of development according to Freudian theory is the oral stage, while the first stage of development according to Erikson's theory is trust versus mistrust.

Another difference is the length of development, with Freud believing that most development occurs in early childhood and Erikson contending that people continue to develop well into their adult years.

Freud's theory has shaped the field of psychology, both in theory and treatment applications. It has also inspired others in the field to better understand the mind and how it develops, developing their own theories in turn. Without Freud, we might not have talk therapy, which research supports for helping people manage and treat mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Freud's psychosexual theory is hard to test scientifically, leaving questions about its validity. Another concern is that the theory is based on case studies versus research. Some have issues with Freud's theory being focused more on male psychosexual development, offering very little insight into females.

It also refers to homosexual preferences as a deviation of normal psychosexual development, though many psychologists today feel that sexual orientation is more biological in nature.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Investigations into the Trans Self and Moore's Paradox pp 25–51 Cite as

Four Classical Philosophical Views of Self

• Linda A. W. Brakel 2  
• First Online: 23 May 2020

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With the aim of addressing the three fundamental philosophical questions—ontological, epistemological, and conceptual—arising owing to the Trans phenomenon, the Self views of Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Freud are reviewed. Each account is evaluated both for strengths and problems, with implications for the philosophical Self questions of central importance brought to light by the Trans phenomenon.

• Classic Self views

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These are Descartes’ brackets and italics, at least as is suggested by translator.

Although Descartes presents a version of this argument in Meditation II ( 1641 / 1969 , pp. 149–157), he does not claim to have “proved” it until Meditation VI ( 1641 / 1969 , pp. 185–199), in which God is the ultimate source of the clear and distinct presentations necessary for Descartes’ proof.

My view, Diachronic Conjunctive Token Physicalism (DiCoToP) is presented in Brakel ( 2013 , Chapter 3, pp. 41–92), “The Ontology of Psychology.”

Although the “gentle force” originates with the “nature of the ideas themselves,” it is also the case that for Hume, resemblance, contiguity, and causality are not inhering in the reality of what is perceived. Some interaction between the ideas themselves and our human proclivities, albeit not active mind proclivities, must be at work for the Humean position.

In Brakel ( 2013 , Chapter 2, pp. 13–37), “Extinction Phenomena: A Biologic Perspective on How and Why Psychoanalysis Works,” contra Hume, I suggest that associations are the result of true mental activity, and that the associative principle underlies conditioning, including classical conditioning.

Note that at least a part of Kant’s phrase “without knowing anything of it…by direct acquaintance…” likely refers here to the absence of empirical evidence for the Self —evidence which for him is itself not possible.

See for instance, Edelman ( 2003 ) for more on the neurophysiology of the binding problem.

Longuenesse ( 2017 , p. 198, n.26) is referring here to Kant ( 1787B / 1965 , B414n.). Here is her entire quote: “Kant talks of ‘degrees of consciousness’ for what really seems to be, on his own account, different types of consciousness or discriminating capacity; one that is based on the mere quality of the sensation; the other that is based on a higher order act that calls on the unity of apperception….But the mere qualitative vivacity does not suffice for consciousness of the differences as such (such as the location of intuited objects in one space, or generation of concepts).”

Kant is obviously a thinker within his own time in so far as he assumes the “lesser-ness” of animal cognition. Only in the most recent century (and sometimes grudgingly still) have the diverse cognitive capabilities of myriad animal species been accorded comparable standing with human cognitive capacities. Now, at least in some quarters, differences between humans and certain non-human animals, as well as variations in cognitions among the various species, are acknowledged and studied.

Kant, I. (1762/1900). False subtlety of the four syllogistic figures. In AA2 [complete works in German], pp. 59–60.

For more on intentional acts and agency See Anscombe’s ( 1957 ) seminal work, and my additions to it, in Brakel ( 2010 , Chapter 4, pp. 91–133). I will say more on this topic in the current work in Chapter 3 , in a subsection on the Agency View of Self .

Tangential to Kant, but of importance for this project, there is another matter to consider regarding the conceptual capacities of the non-human animals discussed in Contrast Case 4. That is the fact that Trans-gender/Transsexual phenomena are not unique to humans. Some non-human animal species, particularly many species of teleost fish are capable of, and do switch either from male-to-female or female-to-male, depending on the species (see Francis 1992 ; and some preliminary comments in Chapter 1 ). As is true in general with the Contrast Cases presented in this project, the Self aspects involved in these non-human animal sex/gender transformations can be better understood than is the case for their human counterparts. This owes to the fact that for the non-humans, such switches are invariably contingent on initially cognizing the environmental conditions that obtain, and always toward increasing the reproductive selective fitness of the transitioning individual’s Self . Note that at least one amphibian species too—the reed frog Hyperolius viridiflavus. Copeia —can switch from female to male (Francis 1992 , p. 1). Much more about fish and sex change will be taken up both in Chapter 5 , advancing a proper-function analysis of gender and Trans-gender, and in Chapter 3 on neuroscience brain research, which includes a section on sex-switching fish.

For example, Maria Ines Carneiro, a Brazilian psychoanalyst, has in a personal communication, made this claim. She also has expressed this view in Carneiro ( 2018 ).

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Brakel, L.A.W. (2020). Four Classical Philosophical Views of Self . In: Investigations into the Trans Self and Moore's Paradox. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44645-1_2

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Freudian Theory and Consciousness: A Conceptual Analysis**

Avinash de sousa.

* Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist, Mumbai, India.

This paper aims at taking a fresh look at Freudian psychoanalytical theory from a modern perspective. Freudian psychology is a science based on the unconscious (id) and the conscious (ego). Various aspects of Freudian thinking are examined from a modern perspective and the relevance of the psychoanalytical theory of consciousness is projected. Do psychoanalysis and the unconsciousness have something to teach us about consciousness? Approaching Freud from a historical, psychoanalytical, anthropological and sociological perspective, we need to look at how Freudian theory may contribute to a better understanding of consciousness. We also need to look at psychoanalytical psychotherapy and its contribution to a better understanding of body-mind dualism and consciousness as a whole. Ego psychology is considered in the present day context and it is synthesized with various psychological studies to give us a better understanding of consciousness.

Introduction

“If often he was wrong and, at times absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives…”

( W.H. Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud) (Auden and Mendelson, 1991 )

Despite distorted understandings of Freudian views and despite periodic waves of Freud bashing, Auden’s assessment remains essentially correct. Freud’s influence continues to be enormous and pervasive. He gave us a new and powerful way to think about and investigate human thought, action and interaction. He often made sense of the ranges that were neglected or misunderstood. Although one might wish to reject or argue with some Freudian interpretations and theories, his writings and insights are too compelling to simply turn away. There is still much to be learned from Freud (Neu, 1991). Much to be learned in relation to issues in contemporary philosophy of mind, moral and social theory. The special characteristics of unconscious states including their relations to states described by modern psychology and the relevance of the Freudian unconsciousness to questions concerning the divided or multiple self is equally important. This paper looks at the connection between Freudian theory/concepts and modern day conceptualisation of consciousness.

Is the Freudian unconscious relevant in the light of modern day consciousness?

Psychoanalysis regarded everything mental being in the first place unconscious, and thus for them, consciousness might be present or absent. This of course provoked a denial from philosophers for whom consciousness and mental were identical and they could never conceive of an absurdity such as an unconscious mental state. Reasons for believing in the existence of the unconsciousness are of course empirical, but the question as to what most fundamentally distinguishes the Freudian unconscious is a conceptual one. It is very important that one understands the nature of the unconsciousness in broad holistic terms rather than the fine details that Freud gave, and also one must follow the coherence of such a concept to understand our present day understanding of consciousness (Freud, 1912; Ricoeur, 1970).

The qualified specialization of consciousness that can be located in ordinary thought about the mind provides a source of motivation that is free from conceptual confusion. The analysis of what it is to be in consciousness has a further importance for the concept of unconscious mentality. If one assumes that all mental states are conscious alone, we will take a highly sceptical stand on Freudian theory and the topographical model of the mind proposed by him (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1983). For example, mental states like beliefs and values do not exist solely by virtue of the consciousness in them. Freud’s notion of unconscious mentality is arrived at by pressing the distinction of mental states from consciousness and combining it with the topographical model where all the psychological locales are spoken of as existing independently from their members at any given moment (Freud, 1915; Freud, 1937).

In William James’s The Principles of Psychology (James, 1890), the concept of unconscious mentality is considered in terms of its role as a necessary concomitant of what James calls the mind stuff theories by which he means theories that regard mental states as empirically analysable compounds.

It would now be helpful to spell out more precisely various conceptions of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconsciousness in terms of successive degrees of independence from the concept of consciousness.

Unconsciousness may be entirely composed of ideas that were previously conscious and have been repressed. This would meet the Lockenian condition on mentality, that is, there can be nothing in the mind that has not been previously in awareness (Ricoeur, 1970).

Unconsciousness may be perceived as entirely composed of, or at least as including some ideas that were not originally conscious but that could become conscious (Sears, 1943).

The last of these conceptions matches the unconsciousness as described in the writings of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion (Bion, 1984; Dryden, 2004), but it is also most probably attributable to Freud. The evidence for the same comes from Freud’s explicit statements that the concept of unconsciousness is broader than that of the repressed and also is made up of a phylogenetic heritage and primal fantasies (Freud, 1938).

A different question now needs to be addressed. It has been supposed that positive reason to believe in the existence of unconsciousness may come, and does in fact come from the notion that unconsciousness is necessary as data of consciousness have very large number of gaps in them (Freud, 1915). Consciousness is characterized by a special kind of unity, on account of which it does not tolerate gaps of any kind. We could interpret Freud’s notion in terms of gaps in self-explanation. These gaps are as such fully psychological in nature and they occur at points where we would ordinarily expect an intentional psychological explanation to be available and in this way, they stand apart from other merely nominal gaps in ordinary psychological explanation (for example, the impossibility of explaining how it is that one ordinarily remembers something).

Freud in his topographical model never looked at the mind to be built up of a number of agencies or systems, but rather these were terms used in a very special way, and it is a further puzzle as to what precisely Freud wanted them to signify (Freud, 1923). Consciousness and unconsciousness are not inimical properties and they are not intrinsically antagonistic to each other. Conflict between them is not regarding their status but because of the particular character of the contents of unconsciousness and their consequent connection with repression (Wollheim, 1973).

Many questions remain unanswered, but it is fitting to conclude that consciousness and unconsciousness are both a set of states with representational content distinguished by special features which need not be regarded as propositional attitudes, characteristically endowed with phenomenology but attributed in a spirit of pure plain psychological realism (Archard, 1984).

Relationships Between Freudian Theory and Cognitive Psychology with Reference to Consciousness

Though over a century has elapsed since Freud first proposed his theory, there has been very little comparison between Freudian theory and its links to nonpsychoanalytic academic psychology. The choice of cognitive psychology in this discussion stems from the fact that cognitive theory and cognitive psychology have a basis in almost all facets of modern psychology. Though cognitive psychology has explained many areas unknown to us 50 years earlier, one must admit that no other theorist ever constructed a conceptual and metatheoretical framework like Freud did, in order to understand psychological questions. No theory so far has ever provided a theory conceptually superior to Freud’s (Reiser, 1984).

Freud reduced the role of consciousness to that of an epistemological tool to know about certain areas of one’s mental state, removing all ontological implications. The evidence available in his time suggested that some mental states might exist outside ones awareness. Thus, Freud had to reject the principle that all mental states are conscious (ontological), but he retained the principle that all conscious states are accessible to awareness (epistemological). The demotion of consciousness to a purely epistemological role leads to serious failure, both by Freud and other theorists. In the transformation of psychology from a science of consciousness to a science of mental representations, there has been a gain in theoretical power, but there has been a loss of something of great value. Psychologists may in fact be avoiding the problem that made the mental realm so puzzling in the first place, the problem of consciousness, and thereby ignoring the mystery that is at the heart of the nature of meaning and mind (Grunbaum, 1984; Holt, 1989; Roth, 1998).

The term ‘conscious’ refers to an irreducible and irreplaceable phenomenon, no matter what the name. Terms such as awareness, reflective awareness, phenomenal awareness and phenomenal representation have all been used to refer to the same thing. Awareness has been used to refer to what we mean when we are at the moment conscious of something but also refers to the latent knowledge of something. The term conscious, unless burdened with additional meaning, may serve to mean what is immediately, subjectively and introspectively given in experience. We may be thus conscious of a rational abstract idea, an obsessional preoccupation or even a hallucination. We are conscious in psychosis, dissociative states, in intoxication and so forth. But each of these represents a quite different mental organisation of experiences, obeying different principles of organisation and existing on different levels of categorization and abstraction (Kihlstrom, 1987).

We shall now take a look at the confusion, both terminological and conceptual, that dogged Freudian thought as well as contemporary cognitive psychology. Freud always struggled with what has been called an adjectival and substantive use of the term conscious. It simply means that the term conscious idea denotes an idea that is directly, subjectively given and capable of being introspected, although it need not be. The experience can be conscious in a variety of different states, i.e., waking alert state, dream state, psychotic state and so on. It is better to refer to the above states as psychological states rather than different states of consciousness. The experience of consciousness may be different in each state but consciousness as a subjective, introspective given, is indivisible no matter what the state of consciousness. But the principles of organisation, levels of categorization and abstraction affecting or producing the experience may be different.

Cognitive psychology has not been immune to confusing and ambiguous uses of the term conscious and consciousness. If consciousness can occur in a variety of psychological states regardless of the principles of organisation, what purpose does being conscious serve and what shall then be the special conditions needed for consciousness to occur? What is the role that consciousness must play in our lives, apart from the operation of the different principles of organisation and levels of abstraction?

Freud gave consciousness the quality and capacity to transform experienced activity into unconscious states, similar to how different forms of energy are interchanged in physics. It could also play a part in inhibiting and restricting certain thoughts from becoming conscious. It also served the purpose of transforming quantities of unconscious excitation into qualitative experiences of pleasure and unpleasure (Freud, 1900; Hartmann, 1964).

Conclusions [see also Figure 1 ]

Flowchart of the paper

Whether psychoanalytic and cognitive science views of the consciousness are fraternal or identical twins, we do not know, but they were certainly reared apart from one another. The psychoanalytic twin was raised in the consulting room, exposed to primal scenes, intrapsychic conflict and the risky improvisations of clinical work, whereas the cognitive twin was raised in the scientific laboratory where calm and order prevailed. There is no doubt that the cognitive and psychoanalytic views are different and come out of different traditions (Shervin and Dickman, 1980). Cognitive science focusses on motive, affect and conflict, whereas psychoanalysis focusses on conflict and underlying psychological processes. There are in fact convergences between these two radically different views but from a holistic perspective. They follow a similarity in the nature of the problems they address, though at first look they seem to be far apart.

The newer developments in the field of cognitive science dealing with levels of categorisation and organisation will be of immense value in studying the hierarchical relationship between unconscious and conscious experiences. The chasm between the consulting room and scientific laboratory may soon narrow. We are now at a stage where we must broaden and deepen the scientific investigation of consciousness and conscious states in a way never done before. We need to apply our imagination and good will while being open minded and flexible at the same time.

Take home message

Freudian theory needs to be given a fresh look. Though considered outdated by some, it has a lot to offer to modern theories of consciousness. Insights from Freudian theory are relevant to modern day concepts of consciousness in cognitive neuroscience. Consciousness and unconsciousness are both independent and interdependent phenomena and their study will yield a different perspective on the evolution of conscious phenomena.

Conflict of interest

None declared

Declaration

This is to state that this is my original, unpublished work and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere.

CITATION: De Sousa A., (2011), Freudian Theory and Consciousness: A Conceptual Analysis. In: Brain, Mind and Consciousness: An International, Interdisciplinary Perspective (A.R. Singh and S.A. Singh eds.), MSM , 9(1), p210-217.

Questions That This Paper Raises

• Is Freudian relevant today, or must it be done away with?
• Does Freudian theory play a role in explaining our modern day concept of consciousness?
• Does the Freudian concept of ‘conscious’ relate at least conceptually to the concept of ‘conscious’ in cognitive psychology?
• Do parts of Freudian theory have resemblance with modern day cognitive psychology and its theories?
• Should qualitative research on Freudian concepts be carried out in the light of modern theories of consciousness?
• Should modern methods of neuroimaging and neuroscience in the light of new data be used to validate Freudian models of conscious phenomena?

About the Author

Avinash De Sousa is a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a private practice in Mumbai. He is an avid reader and has over 40 publications in national and international journals. His main areas of interest are alcohol dependence, child and adolescent psychiatry, mental retardation, autism and developmental disabilities. He is also the academic director of the Institute of Psychotherapy Training and Management, Mumbai. He teaches psychiatry, child psychology and psychotherapy at over 18 institutions as a visiting faculty.

Sigmund Freud’s Concepts of Self and Other Essay

Freudian lectures.

It is possible to discuss several images that are related to Freud’s concepts of self and other. For example, one can look at the following pictures. To some degree, they throw light on the behavior of children and infants at the time when they have little background knowledge. Moreover, they illustrate the importance of bodily experiences.

These images can show how a child learns to distinguish self from other. It should be kept in mind that Sigmund Freud (1991) places emphasis on the notion of bodily self. In other words, an individual’s perception of one’s identity is based on the awareness of his/her body (Freud, 1991). This argument is particularly relevant when one speaks about children.

This is one of the first points that can be made. Thus, the first picture is a good illustration of a how a child tries to learn more about oneself. This is one of the first aspects that can be distinguished. It should be kept in mind that this image depicts a child who acts an explorer. At this point, she is not accustomed to seeing her reflection in the mirror.

Moreover, the movements in front of the mirror help her strengthen the sense of her bodily self. At this point, she does not have a distinct perception of her physical appearance. Overall, Sigmund Freud pays close attention to bodily sensations of a person whose identity has not been developed completely.

They are essential for describing the concept of self which is a vital component of personality. This is one of the aspects that can be identified. It is important for understanding Freud’s ideas and his views on the formation of a human being’s inner world.

However, at the same time, an individual learns to distinguish oneself from other people. For instance, one can look at the second image which illustrates how infants identify the differences in the physical appearance of one another. This experience is of great importance for these children because they can see the distinction between self and other. Moreover, in this way, they can learn more about the surrounding world.

Moreover, these children can shape their own identity by seeing their bodily images. In each of these cases, bodily sensations play an important role. Thus, one can say that the chosen pictures can be related so some of the themes which Sigmund Freud examines in many of his works.

Reference List

Anna Bing Arnold Children’s Center. (2010). W. M. Keck Infant and Toddler Center . Web.

Cross-cultural reflections on the mirror self-recognition test . (2010). Web.

Freud, S. (1991). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis . New York, NY: Penguin Books Limited.

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SigmundFreud

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SigmundFreud is one of the greatest psychologists of all times. He was anAustrian psychologist who developed one of the most importanttheories, the theory of psychoanalysis. He was born in the modern dayCzech Republic in May 1856. His parents were struggling financiallyand thus, they lived in deplorable conditions. spentthe early years of his life in Freiberg Austria before his familymoved to Vienna when he was about four years (Jacobs, 2008). This iswhere he spent most of his life. At the age of 17 years, SigmundFreud joined the University of Vienna. Initially, his desires were tostudy law but he was admitted in the medical school. While in medicalschool, he developed an interest in zoology, philosophy, andpsychology. After graduating in 1881, he started his medical careerat Vienna General Hospital (Jacobs, 2008).

Whilstworking in the hospital, he began his research on cerebral anatomy.In 1884, he published his first research paper which discussed theeffects of palliative cocaine on patients. He worked in differentdepartments in the hospital including the psychiatric clinic. Due tothe substantiated publications, he was appointed a universitylecturer in 1885. In 1986, he resigned from his position in thehospital and started private practice dealing with nervous disorders.In the same year, got married to Martha Bernays andsired six children.was a smoker and argued that itenhanced his abilities to work (Jacobs, 2008).

Thereare many philosophers and psychologists who influenced and inspired him to develop an interest in psychology. In medicalschool, he was influenced by his tutors such as Ernst Brucke andFranz Brentano. Contemporary theorists such as Theodor Lipps, whohad interests in the unconscious mind, had a huge influence onFreud’s thoughts and research (Thurschwell, 2008). He also readworks of great writers and thinkers such as Charles Darwin, FredrickNietzche, and William Shakespeare among others. The greatestinfluence came from his friend Josef Breuer. The work of Josef Breuerhinted to him that the neuroses had a huge relationship withtraumatic experiences. Based on this finding, it was evident that ifthe patients were allowed to talk about the symptoms uninhibitedly,the suffering abated. These findings were published in the studiesin hysteria (Thurschwell, 2008).

Despitethese influences, he made a huge contribution to psychology becausehe was an original thinker. developed scientificstudies and methodologies that were significantly different from theapproaches of his colleagues. Some of his concepts and arguments werebased on his experiences in the past. Some of these experiences werecaptured in one of his work, TheInterpretation of Dreams .For example, he probed his childhood relationship with his father andthe emotional distress he underwent after his death. admitted that during his childhood, he had a contrasting feelingabout his father. He hated him and wished that he was dead due to therivalry for his mother’s affection but also loved and admired himas a father. These experiences formed the basis of his psychoanalysistheory (Thurschwell, 2008).

SigmundFreud proposed several theories of psychology which have an influenceon modern studies. His Theory of Unconscious is based on the role ofthe unconscious mind in the development of mental conditions such asneuroses. The activities of the unconscious mind are revealed throughobsessive behaviors or dreams. Freud theory aimed at explaining theunderlying causes of some of the mental problems by studying theunconscious mind. The unconscious mind was also liked to drivers andinstincts such as Eros and Thanatos . Eros are life instincts which are concerned with self-preservation, while Thanatos are death instants which result in self-destruction. He alsoconcluded that not all actions by humans are motivated by sexualpleasure since death instincts do not involve sexual motivators(Jacobs, 2008).

SigmundFreud also proposed the theory of infantile sexuality which formedthe basis of his arguments on how childhood experiences influenceindividuals in their adult life. He argued that during childhood, anindividual undergoes several stages of development, which includesoral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, and latency stage. Every stageis characterized by a different type of sexual pleasure. Unresolvedconflicts and other experiences during childhood can negativelyaffect the mental health of the individual in adulthood (Jacobs,2008). For example, inability to identify with a parent of the samesex can result into homosexuality in adulthood. Another importantcontribution of in psychology is in the understandingof the structure of the mind. He proposed that the human mind iscomposed of the id, ego, and superego. These elements define thepersonality of the individual. The id is the unconscious impulses,ego mediates between the id and reality, and superego is theperfectionist part of the mind. These formed the foundations of thepsychoanalysis theory, in which the main concept is disharmonybetween the three elements of the mind (Jacobs, 2008).

Jacobs,M. (2008). SigmundFreud .London: SAGE.

Thurschwell,P. (2009). SigmundFreud .Routledge, ISBN 1134027052.

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Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self

Even though Kant himself held that his view of the mind and consciousness were inessential to his main purpose, some of the ideas central to his point of view came to have an enormous influence on his successors. Some of his ideas are now central to cognitive science, for example. Other ideas equally central to his point of view had little influence on subsequent work. In this article, first we survey Kant’s model as a whole and the claims in it that have been influential. Then we examine his claims about consciousness of self specifically. Many of his ideas that have not been influential are ideas about the consciousness of self. Indeed, even though he achieved remarkable insights into consciousness of self, many of these insights next appeared only about 200 years later, in the 1960s and 1970s.

1. A Sketch of Kant’s View of the Mind

2.1 transcendental aesthetic, 2.2 metaphysical deduction, 2.3 transcendental deduction, 1 st edition, 2.4 attack on the paralogisms, 1 st edition.

• 2.5 Two Discussions of the mind in the 2 nd -edition TD and Other Discussions

3.2.1 Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition

3.2.2 synthesis of reproduction in imagination, 3.2.3 synthesis of recognition in a concept, 3.3 synthesis: a 90° turn, 3.4 unity of consciousness, 4.1 thesis 1: two kinds of consciousness of self.

• 4.2 Thesis 2: Representational Base of Consciousness of Self
• 4.3 Thesis 3: Conscious Only of How One Appears to Oneself

4.4 Thesis 4: Referential Machinery of Consciousness of Self

4.5 thesis 5: no manifold in consciousness of self, 4.6 thesis 6: consciousness of self is not knowledge of self, 4.7 thesis 7: conscious of self as single, common subject of experience, 5. knowledge of the mind, 6. where kant has and has not influenced contemporary cognitive research, other internet resources, related entries.

In this article, we will focus on Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) work on the mind and consciousness of self and related issues.

Some commentators believe that Kant’s views on the mind are dependent on his idealism (he called it transcendental idealism). For the most part, that is not so. At worst, most of what he said about the mind and consciousness can be detached from his idealism. Though often viewed as a quintessentially German philosopher, Kant is said to have been one-quarter Scottish. Some philosophers (often Scottish) hold that ‘Kant’ is a Germanization of the Scottish name ‘Candt’, though many scholars now reject the idea. It is noteworthy, however, that his work on epistemology, which led him to his ideas about the mind, was a response to Hume as much as to any other philosopher.

In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20 th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

• The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
• The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
• These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant’s most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.

• To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure are called transcendental arguments .

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.

To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of his transcendental arguments than just ‘best explanations’. He thought that he could get a priori (experience independent) knowledge out of them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of the a priori. He held that some features of the mind and its knowledge had a priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior to experience (because using them is necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these features are a priori truths, i.e., necessary and universal (B3/4) [ 1 ] . And we can come to know these truths, or that they are a priori at any rate, only by using a priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience (B3) (Brook 1993). Kant thought that transcendental arguments were a priori or yielded the a priori in all three ways. Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inference to the best explanation. When introspection fell out of favour about 100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly this approach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant notwithstanding, it is now the major method used by experimental cognitive scientists.

Other topics equally central to Kant’s approach to the mind have hardly been discussed by cognitive science. These include, as we will see near the end, a kind of synthesis that for Kant was essential to minds like ours and what struck him as the most striking features of consciousness of self. Far from his model having been superseded by cognitive science, some things central to the model have not even been assimilated by it.

2. Kant’s Critical Project and How the Mind Fits Into It

The major works so far as Kant’s views on the mind are concerned are the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , first published in 1798 only six years before his death. Since the Anthropology was worked up from notes for popular lectures, it is often superficial compared to CPR. Kant’s view of the mind arose from his general philosophical project in CPR the following way. Kant aimed among other things to,

• Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal truth.
• Insulate religion, including belief in immortality, and free will from the corrosive effects of this very same science.

Kant accepted without reservation that “God, freedom and immortality” (1781/7, Bxxx) exist but feared that, if science were relevant to their existence at all, it would provide reasons to doubt that they exist. As he saw it and very fortunately, science cannot touch these questions. “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge , … in order to make room for faith.” (Bxxx, his italics).

Laying the foundation for pursuit of the first aim, which as he saw it was no less than the aim of showing why physics is a science, was what led Kant to his views about how the mind works. He approached the grounding of physics by asking: What are the necessary conditions of experience (A96)? Put simply, he held that for our experience, and therefore our minds, to be as they are, the way that our experience is tied together must reflect the way that, according to physics, says objects in the world must be tied together. Seeing this connection also tells us a lot about what our minds must be like.

In pursuit of the second aim, Kant criticized some arguments of his predecessors that entailed if sound that we can know more about the mind’s consciousness of itself than Kant could allow. Mounting these criticisms led him to some extraordinarily penetrating ideas about our consciousness of ourselves.

In CPR, Kant discussed the mind only in connection with his main projects, never in its own right, so his treatment is remarkably scattered and sketchy. As he put it, “Enquiry … [into] the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests … is of great importance for my chief purpose, … [but] does not form an essential part of it” (Axvii). Indeed, Kant offers no sustained, focussed discussion of the mind anywhere in his work except the popular Anthropology, which, as we just said, is quite superficial.

In addition, the two chapters of CPR in which most of Kant’s remarks on the mind occur, the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction (TD) and the chapter on what he called Paralogisms (faulty arguments about the mind mounted by his predecessors) were the two chapters that gave him the greatest difficulty. (They contain some of the most impenetrable prose ever written.) Kant completely rewrote the main body of both chapters for the second edition (though not the introductions, interestingly).

In the two editions of CPR, there are seven main discussions of the mind. The first is in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the second is in what is usually called the Metaphysical Deduction (for this term, see below). Then there are two discussions of it in the first-edition TD, in parts 1 to 3 of Section 2 (A98 up to A110) and in the whole of Section 3 (A115-A127) [ 2 ] and two more in the second-edition TD, from B129 to B140 and from B153 to B159, the latter seemingly added as a kind of supplement. The seventh and last is found in the first edition version of Kant’s attack on the Paralogisms, in the course of which he says things of the utmost interest about consciousness of and reference to self. (What little was retained of these remarks in the second edition was moved to the completely rewritten TD.) For understanding Kant on the mind and self-knowledge, the first edition of CPR is far more valuable than the second edition. Kant’s discussion proceeds through the following stages.

Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic. [ 3 ] It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must handle them, if our experience is to have the spatial and temporal properties that it has. This question about the necessary conditions of experience is for Kant a ‘transcendental’ question and the strategy of proceeding by trying to find answers to such questions is, as we said, the strategy of transcendental argument.

Here Kant advances one of his most notorious views: that whatever it is that impinges on us from the mind-independent world does not come located in a spatial nor even a temporal matrix (A37=B54fn.). Rather, it is the mind that organizes this ‘manifold of raw intuition’, as he called it, spatially and temporally. The mind has two pure forms of intuition, space and time, built into it to allow it to do so. (‘Pure’ means ‘not derived from experience’.)

These claims are very problematic. For example, they invite the question, in virtue of what is the mind constrained to locate a bit of information at one spatial or temporal location rather than another? Kant seems to have had no answer to this question (Falkenstein 1995; Brook 1998). Most commentators have found Kant’s claim that space and time are only in the mind, not at all in the mind-independent world, to be implausible.

The activity of locating items in the ‘forms of intuition’, space and time, is one of the three kinds of what Kant called synthesis and discussed in the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction. It is not entirely clear how the two discussions relate.

The Aesthetic is about the conditions of experience, Kant’s official project. The chapter leading up to the Transcendental Deduction, The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding (but generally called the Metaphysical Deduction because of a remark that Kant once made, B159) has a very different starting point.

Starting from (and, Bvii, taking for granted the adequacy of) Aristotelian logic (the syllogisms and the formal concepts that Aristotle called categories), Kant proceeds by analysis to draw out the implications of these concepts and syllogisms for the conceptual structure (the “function of thought in judgment” (A70=B95)) within which all thought and experience must take place. The result is what Kant called the Categories . That is to say, Kant tries to deduce the conceptual structure of experience from the components of Aristotelian logic.

Thus, in Kant’s thought about the mind early in CPR , there is not one central movement but two, one in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the other in the Metaphysical Deduction. The first is a move up from experience (of objects) to the necessary conditions of such experience. The second is a move down from the Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we have to use in judging, namely, the Categories. One is inference up from experience, the other deduction down from conceptual structures of the most abstract kind.

Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, the brilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD). Recall the two movements just discussed, the one from experience to its conditions and the one from Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we must use in all judging (the Categories). This duality led Kant to his famous question of right ( quid juris) (A84=B116): with what right do we apply the Categories, which are not acquired from experience, to the contents of experience? (A85=B117). Kant’s problem here is not as arcane as it might seem. It reflects an important question: How is it that the world as we experience it conforms to our logic? In briefest form, Kant thought that the trick to showing how it is possible for the Categories to apply to experience is to show that it is necessary that they apply (A97). [ 4 ]

TD has two sides, though Kant never treats them separately. He once called them the objective and the subjective deductions (Axvii). The objective deduction is about the conceptual and other cognitive conditions of having representations of objects. It is Kant’s answer to the quid juris question. Exactly how the objective deduction goes is highly controversial, a controversy that we will sidestep here. The subjective deduction is about what the mind, the “subjective sources” of understanding (A97), must as a consequence be like. The subjective deduction is what mainly interests us.

Kant argues as follows. Our experiences have objects, that is, they are about something. The objects of our experiences are discrete, unified particulars. To have such particulars available to it, the mind must construct them based on sensible input. To construct them, the mind must do three kinds of synthesis. It must generate temporal and spatial structure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associate spatio-temporally structured items with other spatio-temporally structured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And it must recognize items using concepts, the Categories in particular (Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept). This threefold doctrine of synthesis is one of the cornerstones of Kant’s model of the mind. We will consider it in more detail in the next Section.

The ‘deduction of the categories’ should now be complete. Strangely enough, the chapter has only nicely got started. In the first edition version, for example, we have only reached A106, about one-third of the way through the chapter. At this point, Kant introduces the notion of transcendental apperception for the first time and the unity of such apperception, the unity of consciousness. Evidently, something is happening (something, moreover, not at all well heralded in the text). We will see what when we discuss Kant’s doctrine of synthesis below.

We can now understand in more detail why Kant said that the subjective deduction is inessential (Axvii). Since the objective deduction is about the conditions of representations having objects, a better name for it might have been ‘deduction of the object’. Similarly, a better name for the subjective deduction might have been ‘the deduction of the subject’ or ‘the deduction of the subject’s nature’. The latter enquiry was inessential to Kant’s main critical project because the main project was to defend the synthetic a priori credentials of physics in the objective deduction. From this point of view, anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind was a happy accident.

The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant’s second project, contains Kant’s most original insights into the nature of consciousness of the self. In the first edition, he seems to have achieved a stable position on self-consciousness only as late as this chapter. Certainly his position was not stable in TD. Even his famous term for consciousness of self, ‘I think’, occurs for the first time only in the introduction to the chapter on the Paralogisms. His target is claims that we know what the mind is like. Whatever the merits of Kant’s attack on these claims, in the course of mounting it, he made some very deep-running observations about consciousness and knowledge of self.

To summarize: in the first edition, TD contains most of what Kant had to say about synthesis and unity, but little on the nature of consciousness of self. The chapter on the Paralogisms contains most of what he has to say about consciousness of self.

2.5 The Two Discussions in the 2 nd -edition TD and Other Discussions

As we said, Kant rewrote both TD and the chapter on the Paralogisms for the second edition of CPR , leaving only their introductions intact. In the course of doing so, he moved the topic of consciousness of self from the chapter on the Paralogisms to the second discussion of the mind in the new TD. The new version of the Paralogisms chapter is then built around a different and, so far as theory of mind is concerned, much less interesting strategy. The relationship of the old and new versions of the chapters is complicated (Brook 1994, Ch. 9). Here we will just note that the underlying doctrine of the mind does not seem to change very much.

CPR contains other discussions of the mind, discussions that remained the same in both editions. The appendix on what Kant called Leibniz’ Amphiboly contains the first explicit discussion of an important general metaphysical notion, numerical identity (being one object at and over time), and contains the first argument in CPR for the proposition that sensible input is needed for knowledge. (Kant asserts this many times earlier but assertion is not argument.) In the Antinomies, the discussion of the Second Antinomy contains some interesting remarks about the simplicity of the soul and there is a discussion of free will in the Solution to the Third Antinomy. The mind also appears a few times in the Doctrine of Method, particularly in a couple of glosses of the attack mounted against the Paralogisms. (A784=B812ff is perhaps the most interesting.)

In other new material prepared for the second edition, we find a first gloss on the topic of self-consciousness as early as the Aesthetic (B68). The mind also appears in a new passage called the Refutation of Idealism, where Kant attempts to tie the possibility of one sort of consciousness of self to consciousness of permanence in something other than ourselves, in a way he thought to be inconsistent with Berkeleian idealism. This new Refutation of Idealism has often been viewed as a replacement for the argument against the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition. There are problems with this view, the most important of which is that the second edition still has a separate fourth Paralogism (B409). That said, though the new passage utilizes self-consciousness in a highly original way, it says little that is new about it.

Elsewhere in his work, the only sustained discussion of the mind and consciousness is, as we said, his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View . By ‘anthropology’ Kant meant the study of human beings from the point of view of their (psychologically-controlled) behaviour, especially their behaviour toward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour such as character. Though Kant sometimes contrasted anthropology as a legitimate study with what he understood empirical psychology to be, namely, psychology based on introspective observation, he meant by anthropology something fairly close to what we now mean by behavioural or experimental psychology.

3. Kant’s View of the Mind

Turning now to Kant’s view of the mind, we will start with a point about method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not entirely consistent views on the empirical study of the mind. The empirical method for doing psychology that Kant discussed was introspection.

Sometimes he held such study to be hopeless. The key text on psychology is in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science . There Kant tell us that “the empirical doctrine of the soul … must remain even further removed than chemistry from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper” (Ak. IV:471). (In Kant’s defence, there was nothing resembling a single unified theory of chemical reactions in his time.) The contents of introspection, in his terms inner sense, cannot be studied scientifically for at least five reasons.

First, having only one universal dimension and one that they are only represented to have at that, namely, distribution in time, the contents of inner sense cannot be quantified; thus no mathematical model of them is possible. Second, “the manifold of internal observation is separated only by mere thought”. That is to say, only the introspective observer distinguishes the items one from another; there are no real distinctions among the items themselves. Third, these items “cannot be kept separate” in a way that would allow us to connect them again “at will”, by which Kant presumably means, according to the dictates of our developing theory. Fourth, “another thinking subject [does not] submit to our investigations in such a way as to be conformable to our purposes” – the only thinking subject whose inner sense one can investigate is oneself. Finally and most damningly, “even the observation itself alters and distorts the state of the object observed” (1786, Ak. IV:471). Indeed, introspection can be bad for the health: it is a road to “mental illness” (‘Illuminism and Terrorism’, 1798, Ak. VII:133; see 161).

In these critical passages, it is not clear why he didn’t respect what he called anthropology more highly as an empirical study of the mind, given that he himself did it. He did so elsewhere. In the Anthropology , for example, he links ‘self-observation’ and observation of others and calls them both sources of anthropology (Ak. VII:142–3).

Whatever, no kind of empirical psychology can yield necessary truths about the mind. In the light of this limitation, how should we study the mind? Kant’s answer was: transcendental method using transcendental arguments (notions introduced earlier). If we cannot observe the connections among the denizens of inner sense to any purpose, we can study what the mind must be like and what capacities and structures (in Kant’s jargon, faculties) it must have if it is to represent things as it does. With this method we can find universally true, that is to say, ‘transcendental’ psychological propositions. We have already seen what some of them are: minds must be able to synthesize and minds must have a distinctive unity, for example. Let us turn now to these substantive claims.

3.2 Synthesis and Faculties

We have already discussed Kant’s view of the mind’s handling of space and time, so we can proceed directly to his doctrine of synthesis. As Kant put it in one of his most famous passages, “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51=B75). Experience requires both percepts and concepts. As we might say now, to discriminate, we need information; but for information to be of any use to us, we must organize the information. This organization is provided by acts of synthesis.

By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge [A77=B103]

If the doctrine of space and time is the first major part of his model of the mind, the doctrine of synthesis is the second. Kant claimed, as we saw earlier, that three kinds of synthesis are required to organize information, namely apprehending in intuition, reproducing in imagination, and recognizing in concepts (A97-A105). Each of the three kinds of synthesis relates to a different aspect of Kant’s fundamental duality of intuition and concept. Synthesis of apprehension concerns raw perceptual input, synthesis of recognition concerns concepts, and synthesis of reproduction in imagination allows the mind to go from the one to the other.

They also relate to three fundamental faculties of the mind. One is the province of Sensibility, one is the province of Understanding, and the one in the middle is the province of a faculty that has a far less settled position than the other two, namely, Imagination (see A120).

The first two, apprehension and reproduction, are inseparable; one cannot occur without the other (A102). The third, recognition, requires the other two but is not required by them. It seems that only the third requires the use of concepts; this problem of non-concept-using syntheses and their relationship to use of the categories becomes a substantial issue in the second edition (see B150ff.), where Kant tries to save the universality of the objective deduction by arguing that all three kinds of syntheses are required to represent objects.

Acts of synthesis are performed on that to which we are passive in experience, namely intuitions ( Anschauungen). Intuitions are quite different from sense-data as classically understood; we can become conscious of intuitions only after acts of synthesis and only by inference from these acts, not directly. Thus they are something more like theoretical entities (better, events) postulated to explain something in what we do recognize. What they explain is the non-conceptual element in representations, an element over which we have no control. Intuitions determine how our representations will serve to confirm or refute theories, aid or impede our efforts to reach various goals.

The synthesis of apprehension is somewhat more shadowy than the other two. In the second edition, the idea does not even appear until §26, i.e., late in TD. At A120, Kant tells us that apprehending impressions is taking them up into the activity of imagination, i.e., into the faculty of the mind that becomes conscious of images. He tells us that we can achieve the kind of differentiation we need to take them up only “in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another” (A99). Kant uses the term ‘impression’ ( Eindrucke ) rarely; it seems to be in the same camp as ‘appearance’ ( Erscheinung ) and ‘intuition’ ( Anschauung ).

The idea behind the strange saying just quoted seems to be this. Kant seems to have believed that we can become conscious of only one new item at a time. Thus a group of simultaneous ‘impressions’ all arriving at the same time would be indistinguishable, “for each representation [ Vorstellung ], in so far as it is contained in a single moment , can never be anything but absolute unity” (A99). Kant’s use of Vorstellung , with its suggestion of synthesized, conceptualized organization, may have been unfortunate, but what I think he meant is this. Prior to synthesis and conceptual organization, a manifold of intuitions would be an undifferentiated unit, a seamless, buzzing confusion. Thus, to distinguish one impression from another, we must give them separate locations. Kant speaks only of temporal location but he may very well have had spatial location in mind, too.

The synthesis of apprehension is closely related to the Transcendental Aesthetic. Indeed, it is the doing of what the Aesthetic tells us that the mind has to be able to do with respect to locating items in time and space (time anyway).

The synthesis of reproduction in imagination has two elements, a synthesis proper and associations necessary for performing that synthesis. (Kant explicitly treats them as separate on A125: “recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension”.) Both start from the appearances, as Kant now calls them, which the synthesis of apprehension has located in time. At first glance, the synthesis of reproduction looks very much like memory ; however, it is actually quite different from memory. It is a matter of retaining earlier intuitions in such a way that certain other representations can “bring about a transition of the mind” to these earlier representations, even in the absence of any current representation of them (A100). Such transitions are the result of the setting up of associations (which, moreover, need not be conscious) and do not require memory. Likewise, no recognition of any sort need be involved; that the earlier representations have become associated with later ones is not something that we need recognize. Memory and recognition are the jobs of synthesis of recognition, yet to come.

To our ears now, it is a little strange to find Kant calling this activity of reproduction and the activity of apprehension acts of imagination . Kant describes the function he had in mind as “a blind but indispensable function of the soul” (A78=B103), so he meant something rather different from what we now mean by the term ‘imagination’ (A120 and fn.). For Kant, imagination is a connecting of elements by forming an image: “… imagination has to bring the manifold of intuitions into the form of an image” (A120). If ‘imagination’ is understood in its root sense of image-making and we see imagination not as opposed to but as part of perception, then Kant’s choice of term becomes less peculiar.

The third kind of synthesis is synthesis of recognition in a concept. To experience objects for Kant, first I have to relate the materials out of which they are constructed to one another temporally and spatially. They may not require use of concepts. Then I have to apply at least the following kinds of concepts: concepts of number, of quality, and of modality (I am experiencing something real or fictitious). These are three of the four kinds of concepts that Kant had identified as Categories. Note that we have so far not mentioned the fourth, relational concepts.

In Kant’s view, recognition requires memory; reproduction is not memory but memory does enter now. The argument goes as follows.

[A merely reproduced] manifold of representation would never … form a whole, since it would lack that unity which only consciousness can impart to it. If, in counting, I forget that the units, which now hover before me, have been added to one another in succession, I should never know that a total is being produced through this successive addition of unit to unit … [A103; see A78=B104].

In fact, as this passage tells us, synthesis into an object by an act of recognition requires two things. One is memory. The other is that something in the past representations must be recognized as related to present ones. And to recognize that earlier and later representations are both representing a single object, we must use a concept, a rule (A121, A126). In fact, we must use a number of concepts: number, quality, modality, and, of course, the specific empirical concept of the object we are recognizing.

Immediately after introducing recognition, Kant brings apperception and the unity of apperception into the discussion. The acts by which we achieve recognition under concepts are acts of apperception. By ‘apperception’, Kant means the faculty or capacity for judging in accord with a rule, for applying concepts. Apperceiving is an activity necessary for and parallel to perceiving (A120). This is one of the senses in which Leibniz used the term, too. To achieve recognition of a unified object, the mind must perform an act of judgment; it must find how various represented elements are connected to one another. This judgment is an act of apperception. Apperception is the faculty that performs syntheses of recognition (A115). Note that we are not yet dealing with transcendental apperception.

To sum up: For experiences to have objects, acts of recognition that apply concepts to spatio-temporally ordered material are required. Representation requires recognition. Moreover, objects of representation share a general structure. They are all some number of something, they all have qualities, and they all have an existence-status. (Put this way, Kant’s claim that the categories are required for knowledge looks quite plausible.)

With the synthesis of recognition, TD should be close to complete. Kant merely needs to argue that these concepts must include the categories, which he does at A111, and that should be that.

But that is not that. In fact, as we said earlier, we are only about one-third of the way through the chapter. The syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition of single objects march in a single temporal/object-generational line. Suddenly at A106 Kant makes a kind of 90 o turn. From the generation of a representation of individual objects of experience over time , he suddenly turns to a form of recognition that requires the unification and recognition of multiple objects existing at the same time. He moves from acts of recognition of individual objects to unified acts of recognition of multiple objects which “stand along side one another in one experience” (A108). This 90 o turn is a pivotal moment in TD and has received less attention than it deserves.

The move that Kant makes next is interesting. He argues that the mind could not use concepts so as to have unified objects of representation if its consciousness were not itself unified (A107–108). Why does consciousness and its unity appear here? We have been exploring what is necessary to have experience. Why would it matter if, in addition, unified consciousness were necessary? As Walker (1978, p. 77) and Guyer (1987, pp. 94–5) have shown, Kant did not need to start from anything about the mind to deduce the Categories. (A famous footnote in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science [Ak. IV:474fn.] is Kant’s best-known comment on this issue.) So why does he suddenly introduce unified consciousness?

So far Kant has ‘deduced’ only three of the four kinds of categorical concepts, number, quality, and modality. He has said nothing about the relational categories. For Kant, this would have been a crucial gap. One of his keenest overall objectives in CPR is to show that physics is a real science. To do this, he thinks that he needs to show that we must use the concept of causality in experience. Thus, causality is likely the category that he cared more about than all the other categories put together. Yet up to A106, Kant has said nothing about the relational categories in general or causality in particular. By A111, however, Kant is talking about the use of the relational categories and by A112 causality is front and centre. So it is natural to suppose that, in Kant’s view at least, the material between A106 and A111 contains an argument for the necessity of applying the relational categories, even though he never says so.

Up to A106, Kant has talked about nothing but normal individual objects: a triangle and its three sides, a body and its shape and impenetrability. At A107, he suddenly begins to talk about tying together multiple represented objects, indeed “all possible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in one experience” (A108). The solution to the problem of showing that we have to use the category of causality must lie somewhere in this activity of tying multiple objects together.

The passage between A106 and A111 is blindingly difficult. It takes up transcendental apperception, the unity and identity of the mind, and the mind’s consciousness of itself as the subject of all its representations (A106–108). I think that this passage introduces either a new stage or even a new starting point for TD. Here many commentators (Strawson, Henrich, Guyer) would think immediately of self-consciousness. Kant did use consciousness of self as a starting point for deductions, at B130 in the B-edition for example. But that is not what appears here, not in the initial paragraphs anyway.

What Kant does say is this. Our experience is “one experience”; “all possible appearances … stand alongside one another in one experience” (A108). We have “one and the same general experience” of “all … the various perceptions” (A110), “a connected whole of human knowledge” (A121). Let us call this general experience a global representation .

Transcendental apperception (hereafter TA) now enters. It is the ability to tie ‘all appearances’ together into ‘one experience’.

This transcendental unity of apperception forms out of all possible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws. [A108]

It performs a “synthesis of all appearances according to concepts”, “whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension … to a transcendental unity” (A108). This, he thought, requires unified consciousness. Unified consciousness is required for another reason, too. Representations

can [so much as] represent something to me only in so far as they belong with all others to one consciousness. Therefore, they must at least be capable of being so connected [A116].

The introduction of unified consciousness opens up an important new opportunity. Kant can now explore the necessary conditions of conscious content being unified in this way. To make a long story short, Kant now argues that conscious content could have the unity that it does only if the contents themselves are tied together causally. [ 5 ]

With this, his deduction of the relational categories is complete and his defence of the necessity of physics is under way. The notion of unified consciousness to which Kant is appealing here is interesting in its own right, so let us turn to it next. [ 6 ]

For Kant, consciousness being unified is a central feature of the mind, our kind of mind at any rate. In fact, being a single integrated group of experiences (roughly, one person’s experiences) requires two kinds of unity.

• The consciousness that this subject has of represented objects and/or representations must be unified.

The first requirement may look trivial but it is not. For Hume, for example, what makes a group of experiences one person’s experiences is that they are associated with one another in an appropriate way (the so-called bundle theory), not that they have a common subject. The need for a subject arises from two straightforward considerations: representations not only represent something, they represent it to someone; and, representations are not given to us – to become a representation, sensory inputs must be processed by an integrated cognitive system. Kant may have been conscious of both these points, but beyond identifying the need, he had little to say about what the subject of experience might be like, so we will say no more about it. (We will, however, say something about what its consciousness of itself is like later.)

Kant seems to have used the terms ‘ unity of consciousness ’ (A103) and ‘unity of apperception’ (A105, A108) interchangeably. The well-known argument at the beginning of the first edition attack on the second paralogism (A352) focuses on this unity at a given time (among other things) and what can (or rather, cannot) be inferred from this about the nature of the mind (a topic to which we will return below). The attack on the third paralogism focuses on what can be inferred from unified consciousness over time. These are all from the first edition of CPR . In the second edition, Kant makes remarks about unity unlike anything in the first edition, for example, “this unity … is not the category of unity” (B131). The unity of consciousness and Kant’s views on it are complicated issues but some of the most important points include the following.

By ‘unity of consciousness’, Kant seems to have the following in mind: I am conscious not only of single experiences but of a great many experiences at the same time. The same is true of actions; I can do and be conscious of doing a number of actions at the same time. In addition to such synchronic unity, many global representations, as we called them, display temporal unity: current representation is combined with retained earlier representation. (Temporal unity is often a feature of synthesis of recognition.) Any representation that we acquire in a series of temporal steps, such as hearing a sentence, will have unity across time (A104; A352).

Kant himself did not explicate his notion of unified consciousness but here is one plausible articulation of the notion at work in his writings.

The unity of consciousness = df. (i) a single act of consciousness, which (ii) makes one conscious of a number of representations and/or objects of representation in such a way that to be conscious by having any members of this group is also to be conscious by having others in the group and of at least some of them as a group.

As this definition makes clear, consciousness being unified is more than just being one state of consciousness. Unified consciousness is not just singular, it is unified.

Kant placed great emphasis on the unity of consciousness, both positively and negatively. Positively, he held that conceptualized representation has to be unified both at and across time. Negatively, from a mind having unified consciousness, he held that nothing follows concerning its composition, its identity, especially its identity across time , nor its materiality or immateriality. He argued these points in his attacks on the second, third and fourth Paralogisms.

4. Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self

Many commentators hold that consciousness of self is central to the Critical philosophy. There is reason to question this: unified consciousness is central, but consciousness of self? That is not so clear. Whatever, the topic is intrinsically interesting and Kant achieved some remarkable insights into it. Strangely, none of his immediate successors took them up after his death and they next appeared at the earliest in Wittgenstein (1934–5) and perhaps not until Shoemaker (1968). Kant never discussed consciousness of self in its own right, only in the context of pursuing other objectives, and his remarks on the topic are extremely scattered. When we pull his various remarks together, we can see that Kant advanced at least seven major theses about consciousness of and knowledge of self . We will consider them one-by-one.

The first thesis:

• There are two kinds of consciousness of self: consciousness of oneself and one’s psychological states in inner sense and consciousness of oneself and one’s states via performing acts of apperception.

Kant’s term for the former was ‘empirical self-consciousness’. A leading term for the latter was ‘transcendental apperception’ (TA). (Kant used the term ‘TA’ in two very different ways, as the name for a faculty of synthesis and as the name for what he also referred to as the ‘I think’, namely, one’s consciousness of oneself as subject.) Here is a passage from the Anthropology in which Kant distinguishes the two kinds of consciousness of self very clearly:

… the “I” of reflection contains no manifold and is always the same in every judgment … Inner experience , on the other hand, contains the matter of consciousness and a manifold of empirical inner intuition: … [1798, Ak. VII:141–2, emphases in the original].

The two kinds of consciousness of self have very different sources.

The source of empirical self-consciousness is what Kant called inner sense. He did not work out his notion of inner sense at all well. Here are just a few of the problems. Kant insists that all representational states are in inner sense, including those representing the objects of outer sense (i.e., spatially located objects):

Whatever the origins of our representations, whether they are due to the influence of outer things, or are produced through inner causes, whether they arise a priori , or being appearances have an empirical origin, they must all, as modifications of the mind, belong to inner sense. [A98–9]

However, he also says that the object of inner sense is the soul, the object of outer sense the body (including one’s own). He comes close to denying that we can be conscious of the denizens of inner sense—they do not represent inner objects and have no manifold of their own. Yet he also says that we can be conscious of them — representations can themselves be objects of representations, indeed, representations can make us conscious of themselves. In its role as a form of or means to consciousness of self, apperception ought to be part of inner sense. Yet Kant regularly contrasted apperception, a means to consciousness of oneself and one’s acts of thinking, with inner sense as a means to consciousness of—what? Presumably, particular representations: perceptions, imaginings, memories, etc. Here is another passage from the Anthropology :

§24. Inner sense is not pure apperception, consciousness of what we are doing; for this belongs to the power of thinking. It is, rather, consciousness of what we undergo as we are affected by the play of our own thoughts. This consciousness rests on inner intuition, and so on the relation of ideas (as they are either simultaneous or successive). [1798, Ak. VII:161]

Kant makes the same distinction in CPR :

… the I that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am … [B155].

Since most of Kant’s most interesting remarks about consciousness of and knowledge of self concern consciousness of oneself, the ‘I of reflection’ via acts of apperception, we will focus on it, though empirical consciousness of self will appear again briefly from time to time.

4.2 Thesis 2: Representational Base of Consciousness of Oneself and One’s States

How does apperception give rise to consciousness of oneself and one’s states? In the passage just quoted from the Anthropology, notice the phrase “consciousness of what we are doing” — doing. The way in which one becomes conscious of an act of representing is not by receiving intuitions but by doing it: “synthesis …, as an act, … is conscious to itself, even without sensibility” (B153); “… this representation is an act of spontaneity , that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (B132).

Equally, we can be conscious of ourselves as subject merely by doing acts of representing. No further representation is needed.

Man, … who knows the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also through pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard as impressions of the senses [A546=B574].

How does one’s consciousness of oneself in one’s acts of representing work? Consider the sentence:

I am looking at the words on the screen in front of me.

Kant’s claim seems to be that the representation of the words on the screen is all the experience I need to be conscious not just of the words and the screen but also of the act of seeing them and of who is seeing them, namely, me. A single representation can do all three jobs. Let us call an act of representing that can make one conscious of its object, itself and oneself as its subject the representational base of consciousness of these three items. [ 7 ] Kant’s second major thesis is,

• Most ordinary representations generated by most ordinary acts of synthesis provide the representational base of consciousness of oneself and one’s states.

Note that this representational base is the base not only of consciousness of one’s representational states. It is also the base of consciousness of oneself as the subject of those states—as the thing that has and does them. Though it is hard to know for sure, Kant would probably have denied that consciousness of oneself in inner sense can make one conscious of oneself as subject, of oneself as oneself, in this way.

For Kant, this distinction between consciousness of oneself and one’s states by doing acts of synthesis and consciousness of oneself and one’s states as the objects of particular representations is of fundamental importance. When one is conscious of oneself and one’s states by doing cognitive and perceptual acts, one is conscious of oneself as spontaneous, rational, self-legislating, free—as the doer of deeds, not just as a passive receptacle for representations: “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination” (B158–159), of “the activity of the self” (B68) (Sellars, 1970–1; Pippin, 1987).

So far we have focussed on individual representations. For Kant, however, the representations that serve as the representational base of consciousness of oneself as subject are usually much ‘bigger’ than that, i.e., contain multiple objects and often multiple representations of them tied together into what Kant called ‘general experience’.

When we speak of different experiences, we can refer only to the various perceptions, all of which belong to one and the same general experience. This thoroughgoing synthetic unity of perceptions is the form of experience; it is nothing less than the synthetic unity of appearances in accordance with concepts [A110].

This general experience is the global representation introduced earlier. When I am conscious of many objects and/or representations of them as the single object of a single global representation, the latter representation is all the representation I need to be conscious not just of the global object but also of myself as the common subject of all the constituent representations.

The mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations… if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all [the manifold] … to a transcendental unity… [A108].

I am conscious of myself as the single common subject of a certain group of experiences by being conscious of “the identity of the consciousness in … conjoined … representations” (B133).

4.3 Thesis 3: Consciousness in Inner Sense is Only of How One Appears to Oneself

Neither consciousness of self by doing apperceptive acts nor empirical consciousness of self as the object of particular representations yields knowledge of oneself as one is. On pain of putting his right to believe in immortality as an article of faith at risk, Kant absolutely had to claim this. As he put it,

it would be a great stumbling block, or rather would be the one unanswerable objection, to our whole critique if it were possible to prove a priori that all thinking beings are in themselves simple substances. [B409]

The same would hold for all other properties of thinking beings. Since Kant also sometimes viewed immortality, i.e., personal continuity beyond death, as a foundation of morality, morality could also be at risk. So Kant had powerful motives to maintain that one does not know oneself as one is. Yet, according to him, we seem to know at least some things about ourselves, namely, how we must function, and it would be implausible to maintain that one never conscious of one’s real self at all. Kant’s response to these pressures is ingenious.

First, he treats inner sense: When we know ourselves as the object of a representation in inner sense, we “know even ourselves only .. as appearance …” (A278).

Inner … sense … represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected [by ourselves] (B153).

This is the third thesis:

• In inner sense, one is conscious of oneself only as one appears to oneself, not as one is.

So when we seem to be directly conscious of features of ourselves, we in fact have the same kind of consciousness of them as we have of features of things in general—we appear to ourselves to be like this, that or the other, in just the way that we know of any object only as it appears to us.

Then he turns to consciousness of oneself and one’s states by doing apperceptive acts. This is a knottier problem. Here we will consider only consciousness of oneself as subject. Certainly by the second edition, Kant had come to see how implausible it would be to maintain that one has no consciousness of oneself, one’s real self, at all when one is conscious of oneself as the subject of one’s experience, agent of one’s acts, by having these experiences and doing those acts. In the 2 nd edition, he reflects this sensitivity as early as B68; at B153, he goes so far as to say that an apparent contradiction is involved.

Furthermore, when we are conscious of ourselves as subject and agent by doing acts of apperceiving, we do appear to ourselves to be substantial, simple and continuing. He had to explain these appearances away; doing so was one of his aims, indeed, in his attacks on the second and third Paralogisms. Thus, Kant had strong motives to give consciousness of self as subject special treatment. The view that proposes is puzzling. I am not consciousness of myself as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself but only “that I am” (B157). To understand what he might mean here, we need a couple of intermediate theses. They contain the remarkable insights into reference to and consciousness of self mentioned earlier.

Kant generated the special treatment he needed by focussing first on reference to self. Here are some of the things that he said about reference to oneself as subject. It is a consciousness of self in which “nothing manifold is given.” (B135). In the kind of reference in which we gain this consciousness of self, we “denote” but do not “represent” ourselves (A382). We designate ourselves without noting “any quality whatsoever” in ourselves (A355). This yields his fourth thesis about consciousness of and knowledge of self.

• The referential machinery used to obtain consciousness of self as subject requires no identifying (or other) ascription of properties to oneself.

This is a remarkably penetrating claim; remember, the study of reference and semantics generally is usually thought to have begun only with Frege. Kant is anticipating two important theses about reference to self that next saw the light of day only 200 years later.

• In such cases, first-person indexicals (I, me, my, mine) cannot be analysed out in favour of anything else, in particular anything descriptionlike (the essential indexical) (Perry 1979).

Was Kant actually aware of (1) and/or (2) or had he just stumbled across something that later philosophers recognized as significant?

One standard argument for (1) goes as follows:

My use of the word ‘I’ as the subject of [statements such as ‘I feel pain’ or ‘I see a canary’] is not due to my having identified as myself something [otherwise recognized] of which I know, or believe, or wish to say, that the predicate of my statement applies to it [Shoemaker 1968, pp.558].

A standard argument for (2), that certain indexicals are essential, goes as follows. To know that I wrote a certain book a few years ago, it is not enough to know that someone over six feet tall wrote that book, or that someone who teaches philosophy at a particular university wrote that book, or … or … or … , for I could know all these things without knowing that it was me who has these properties (and I could know that it was me who wrote that book and not know that any of these things are properties of me). As Shoemaker puts it,

… no matter how detailed a token-reflexive-free description of a person is, … it cannot possibly entail that I am that person [1968, pp. 560].

Kant unquestionably articulated the argument for (1):

In attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designate the subject only transcendentally … without noting in it any quality whatsoever—in fact, without knowing anything of it either directly or by inference [A355].

This transcendental designation, i.e., referring to oneself using ‘I’ without ‘noting any quality’ in oneself, has some unusual features. One can refer to oneself in a variety of ways, of course: as the person in the mirror, as the person born on such and such a date in such and such a place, as the first person to do X , and so on, but one way of referring to oneself is special: it does not require identifying or indeed any ascription to oneself. So Kant tells us. [ 9 ]

The question is more complicated with respect to (2). We cannot go into the complexities here (see Brook 2001). Here we will just note three passages in which Kant may be referring to the essential indexical or something like it.

The subject of the categories cannot by thinking the categories [i.e. applying them to objects] acquire a concept of itself as an object of the categories. For in order to think them, its pure self-consciousness, which is what was to be explained, must itself be presupposed. [B422]

The phrase ‘its pure self-consciousness’ seems to refer to consciousness of oneself as subject. If so, the passage may be saying that judgments about oneself, i.e., ascriptions of properties to oneself, ‘presuppose … pure self-consciousness’, i.e., consciousness of oneself via an act of ascription-free transcendental designation.

Now compare this, “it is … very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose to know any object … .” (A402), and this,

Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X . It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation. [A346=B404]

The last clause is the key one: “any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation”. Kant seems to be saying that to know that anything is true of me, I must first know that it is me of whom it is true. This is something very like the essential indexical claim.

If reference to self takes place without ‘noting any properties’ of oneself, the consciousness that results will also have some special features.

The most important special feature is that, in this kind of consciousness of self, one is not, or need not be, conscious of any properties of oneself, certainly not any particular properties. One has the same consciousness of self no matter what else one is conscious of — thinking, perceiving, laughing, being miserable, or whatever. Kant expressed the thought this way,

through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given. [B135]

the I that I think is distinct from the I that it … intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition. [B155]

We now have the fifth thesis to be found in Kant:

• When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one has a bare consciousness of self in which “nothing manifold is given.”

Since, on Kant’s view, one can refer to oneself as oneself without knowing any properties of oneself, not just identifying properties, ‘non-ascriptive reference to self’ might capture what is special about this form of consciousness of self better than Shoemaker’s ‘self-reference without identification’.

Transcendental designation immediately yields the distinction that Kant needs to allow that one is conscious of oneself as one is, not just of an appearance of self, and yet deny knowledge of oneself as one is. If consciousness of self ascribes nothing to the self, it can be a “bare … consciousness of self [as one is]” and yet yield no knowledge of self—it is “very far from being a knowledge of the self” (B158). This thesis returns us to consciousness of self as subject:

• When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one’s bare consciousness of self yields no knowledge of self.

In Kant’s own work, he then put the idea of transcendental designation to work to explain how one can appear to oneself to be substantial, simple and persisting without these appearances reflecting how one actually is. The reason that one appears in these ways is not that the self is some strange, indefinable being. It is because of the kind of referring that we do to become conscious of oneself as subject. Given how long ago he worked, Kant’s insights into this kind of referring are nothing short of amazing.

The last of Kant’s seven theses about consciousness of self is an idea that we already met when we discussed the unity of consciousness:

• When we are conscious of ourselves as subject, we are conscious of ourselves as the “single common subject” [CPR, A350] of a number of representations.

What Kant likely had in mind is nicely captured in a remark of Bennett’s (1974, p. 83): to think of myself as a plurality of things is to think of my being conscious of this plurality, “and that pre-requires an undivided me .” Unlike one of anything else, it is not optional that I think of myself as one subject across a variety of experiences (A107).

The remarks just noted about ‘bare consciousness’ and so on by no means exhaust the concerns that can be raised about Kant and what we can know about the mind. His official view has to be: nothing — about the mind’s structure and what it is composed of, at any rate, we can know nothing. As we have seen, Kant not only maintained this but did some ingenious wiggling to account for the apparent counter-evidence. But that is not the end of the story, for two reasons.

First, whatever the commitments of his philosophy, Kant the person believed that the soul is simple and persists beyond death; he found materialism utterly repugnant (1783, Ak. IV, end of §46). This is an interesting psychological fact about Kant but needs no further discussion.

Second and more importantly, Kant in fact held that we do have knowledge of the mind as it is. In particular, we know that it has forms of intuition in which it must locate things spatially and temporally, that it must synthesize the raw manifold of intuition in three ways, that its consciousness must be unified, and so on — all the aspects of the model examined above.

To square his beliefs about what we cannot know and what we do know about the mind, Kant could have made at least two moves. He could have said that we know these things only ‘transcendentally’, that is to say, by inference to the necessary conditions of experience. We do not know them directly, in some sense of ‘directly’, so we don’t have intuitive, i.e., sense-derived knowledge of them. Or he could have said that ontological neutrality about structure and composition is compatible with knowledge of function. As we saw, Kant’s conception of the mind is functionalist—to understand the mind, we must study what it does and can do, its functions—and the doctrine that function does not dictate form is at the heart of contemporary functionalism. According to functionalism, we can gain knowledge of the mind’s functions while knowing little or nothing about how the mind is built. Approached this way, Kant’s view that we know nothing of the structure and composition of the mind would just be a radical version of this functionalist idea. Either move would restore consistency among his various claims about knowledge of the mind.

We will close by returning to the question of Kant’s relationship to contemporary cognitive research. As we saw, some of Kant’s most characteristic doctrines about the mind are now built into the very foundations of cognitive science. We laid out what they were. Interestingly, some of the others have played little or no role.

Consider the two forms of Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. In the form of binding, the phenomenon that he had in mind in the first kind of synthesis is now widely studied. Indeed, one model, Anne Treisman’s (1980) three-stage model, is very similar to all three stages of synthesis in Kant. According to Treisman and her colleagues, object recognition proceeds in three stages: first feature detection, then location of features on a map of locations, and then integration and identification of objects under concepts. This compares directly to Kant’s three-stage model of apprehension of features, association of features (reproduction), and recognition of integrated groups of under concepts (A98-A106). However, Kant’s second kind of recognition under concepts, the activity of tying multiple representations together into a global representation (A107–14), has received little attention.

The same was true until recently of the unity of consciousness and Kant’s work on it. However, this is changing. In the past twenty years, the unity of consciousness has come back onto the research agenda and there are now hundreds of papers and a number of books on the topic. However, claims such as Kant’s that a certain form of synthesis and certain links among the contents of experience are required for unity continue to be ignored in cognitive science, though a few philosophers have done some work on them (Brook 2004). The same is true of Kant’s views on consciousness of self; cognitive science has paid no attention to non-ascriptive identification of self and the idea of the essential indexical. Here, too, a few philosophers have worked on these issues, apparently without knowing of Kant’s contribution (Brook & DeVidi, 2001), but not cognitive scientists.

In short, the dominant model of the mind in contemporary cognitive science is Kantian, but some of his most distinctive contributions have not been taken into it (Brook, 2004).

Primary Literature

The Cambridge Edition of the Work of Immanuel Kant in Translation has translations into English complete with scholarly apparatus of nearly all Kant’s writings. It is probably the best single source for Kant’s works in English. Except for references to the Critique of Pure Reason , all references will include the volume number and where appropriate the page number of the Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Koniglichen Preussischen Academie der Wissenschaften, 29 Vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter et al., 1902– [in the format, Ak. XX:yy]).

• Kant, I. (1781/1787) Critique of Pure Reason , P. Guyer and A. Wood (trans.), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The passages quoted in the article above generally follow this translation and/or the Kemp Smith translation but all translations were checked.) References to CPR are in the standard pagination of the 1 st (A) and 2 nd (B) editions. A reference to only one edition means that the passage appeared only in that edition.)
• Kant, I. (1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics , P. Carus (trans.), revised and with an Introduction by James Ellington, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 1977 (Ak. IV).
• Kant, I. (1786) The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science , translated and with an Introduction by James Ellington, Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts, 1970. (Ak. IV).
• Kant, I. (1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , Mary Gregor (trans.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 (Ak. VII).

Works on Kant on the Mind and Consciousness

Thanks to Julian Wuerth for help with this section.

In the past two decades alone, of the order of 45,000 new books and new editions by or about Kant have been published. Thus, any bibliography is bound to be incomplete. In what follows, we have focused on books of the past ten years or so in English that are having an influence, along with a few important earlier commentaries. General bibliographies are readily available on the websites listed later.

• Allais, Lucy, 2009. “Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 47(3): 383–413.
• –––, 2015. Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Allison, H., 1983 [2004]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense , 1st edition 1983, 2nd edition 2004, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• –––, 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2015. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Altman, M. C., 2007. A Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Boulder, CO: Westview Press
• Ameriks, K., 1983. “Kant and Guyer on Apperception”, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 65: 174–86.
• –––, 1990. “Kant, Fichte, and Short Arguments to Idealism”, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 72: 63–85.
• –––, 2000. Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason , 2 nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006. Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy As Critical Interpretation , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Aquila, Richard, 1989. Matter in Mind , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Banham, G., 2006. Kant’s Transcendental Imagination , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
• Beck, L. W., 2002. Selected Essays on Kant (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 6), Rochester NY: North American Kant Society. [NAKS has published an excellent series of roughly annual books on Kant. Some more examples will be cited below.]
• Beiser, F. C., 2006. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
• Bennett, J., 1966. Kant’s Analytic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1974. Kant’s Dialectic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bird, G., 2006. The Revolutionary Kant , Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing
• –––, 2009. A Companion to Kant , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Brook, A., 1993. “Kant’s A Priori Methods for Recognizing Necessary Truths”, in Return of the A Priori , Philip Hanson and Bruce Hunter (eds.), Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume), 18: 215–52.
• –––, 1994. Kant and the Mind , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1998. “Critical Notice of L. Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic ”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 29: 247–68.
• –––, 2001. “Kant on self-reference and self-awareness”, in A. Brook and R. DeVidi (eds.) 2001.
• –––, 2004. “Kant, cognitive science, and contemporary neo-Kantianism”, in D. Zahavi (ed.), Journal of Consciousness Studies (special issue), 11: 1–25.
• Buroker, J. V., 2006. Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Caranti, L., 2007. Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy: The Kantian Critique of Cartesian Scepticism (Toronto Studies in Philosophy), Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Carl, Wolfgang, 1989. Der Schweigende Kant: Die Entwürfe zu einer Deduktion der Kategorien vor 1781 , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
• Caygill, H., 1995. A Kant Dictionary , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
• Chignell, Andrew, 2017. “Can’t Kant Cognize himself? Or, A Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism”, in Kant and the Philosophy of Mind , A. Gomes and A. Stephenson (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Choi, Yoon, 2019. “Spontaneity and Self-Consciousness in the Groundwork and the B-Critique ”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 49(7): 936–955.
• Cohen, A., 2009. Kant and the Human Sciences: Biology, Anthropology and History , Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.
• –––, 2014. Kant on Emotions and Value , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.
• –––, 2014. Critical Guide to Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Deimling, Wiebke, 2014. “Kant’s Pragmatic Concept of Emotions,” in Kant on Emotion and Value , Alix Cohen (ed.), London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• –––, 2018. “Two Different Kinds of Value? Kant on Feeling and Moral Cognition”, Kant and the Faculty of Feeling , Kelly Sorensen and Diane Williamson (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dickerson, A.B., 2007. Kant on Representation and Objectivity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Dyck, Corey W., 2014. Kant and Rational Psychology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Easton, P.A. (ed.), 1997. Logic and the Workings of the Mind (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy: Volume 5), Rochester NA: North American Kant Society.
• Emundts, Dina, 2017. “Kant’s Ideal of Self-Knowledge,” in Self-Knowledge. A History , Ursula Renz (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 183–198.
• –––, 2013. “Kant über Selbstbewusstsein”, in Self, World, Art. Metaphysical Topics in Kant and Hegel , Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 51–78.
• Falkenstein, L., 1995. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Forster, M. N., 2008. Kant and Skepticism , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press
• Friedman, M., 1992. Kant and the Exact Sciences , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press
• Frierson, Patrick R., 2003. Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gardner, S., 2012. Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks), London: Routledge Francis Taylor.
• Ginsborg, H., 1990. The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (Routledge Library Editions: Kant). London: Routledge Francis Taylor.
• Glock, H.-J., 2003. Strawson and Kant (Mind Association Occasional Series), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Goldman, A., 2012. Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea , South Bend, IN: University of Indiana Press.
• Grier, M., 2007. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Modern European Philosophy), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Guyer, P., 1980. “Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis.” American Philosophical Quarterly , 17: 205–12.
• –––, 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2005. Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• –––, 2006. Kant (Series: Routledge Philosophers), London: Routledge Taylor
• –––, 1987. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• –––, 2008. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press
• Guyer, P. (ed.), 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Kant , Cambridge:Cambridge University Press
• ––– (ed.), 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hall, B., M. Black and M. Sheffield, 2010. The Arguments of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Hanna, R., 2004. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006. Kant, Science, and Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2015. The Rational Human Condition 5—Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Heidemann, D., 2012. Kant and Non-Conceptual Content , London: Routledge Taylor Francis.
• Hems, N., D. Schulting and G. Banham (eds.), 2012. The Continuum Companion to Kant , London: Continuum Publishers.
• Henrich, D., 1976. Identität und Objektivität , Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäts-Verlag.
• Höffe, Otfried, 1994. Immanuel Kant , Marshall Farrier (trans.), Albany: SUNY Press.
• Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 1993. “Kants Paralogismen”, Kant-Studien , 84: 408-25.
• Hogan, Desmond, 2009. “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves”, Noûs , 43(1): 49–63.
• Howell, R., 1992. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction , Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers
• –––, (2001). “Kant, the ‘I Think’, and Self-Awareness”, in Kant’s Legacy. Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck , Cicovacki, Predrag (ed.), Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 117–152.
• Huneman, P., 2007. Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy: Volume 9), Rochester NA: North American Kant Society.
• Jacobs, B. and Kain, P. (eds.), 2007. Essays on Kant’s Anthropology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Jauernig, Anja, 2019. “Finite minds and their representations in Leibniz and Kant”, in Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism , Sally Sedgwick and Dina Edmundts (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 47–80.
• Keller, P., 1998. Kant and the Demands of Self-consciousness , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kitcher, P., 1984. “Kant’s Real Self,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy , Allen W. Wood (ed.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 113–147.
• –––, 1990. Kant’s Transcendental Psychology , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011. Kant’s Thinker , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kleingeld, P., 2011. Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Klemme, Heiner, 1996. Kants Philosophie des Subjekts. Systematische und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis , Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
• Kneller, J., 2007. Kant and the Power of Imagination , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Korsgaard, Christine M., 1990. The Standpoint of Practical Reason , New York: Garland.
• –––, 1989. “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit”, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 18(2): 101–132.
• –––, 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kraus, Katharina, 2019. “The Parity and Disparity between Inner and Outer Experience in Kant”, Kantian Review 24(2): 171–195.
• –––, 2020. Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kreimendahl, Lothar, 1990. Kant—Der Durchbruch von 1769 , Köln: Jürgen Dinter.
• Kuehn, M., 2001. Kant: A Biography , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kukla, R. (ed.), 2006. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Laywine, A., 1993. Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy: Volume 3), Rochester NA: North American Kant Society.
• Longuenesse, Béatrice, 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason , Charles T. Wolfe (trans.), Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2005. Kant on the Human Standpoint , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2007. “Kant’s ‘I think’ versus Descartes’ ‘I am a Thing that Thinks’”, in Kant and the Early Moderns , Beatrice Longuenesse and Daniel Garber (eds.), Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 9–31.
• –––, 2017. I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Louden, R., 2011. Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Marshall, Colin, 2013. “Kant’s one self and the appearance/thing in itself distinction,” Kant-Studien , 104(4): 421–441.
• McLear, Colin, 2011. “Kant on Animal Consciousness,” Philosophers’ Imprint , 11(15): 1–16.
• Melnick, Arthur, 2009. Kant’s Theory of the Self , New York: Routledge Taylor Francis.
• Meerbote, R., 1989. “Kant’s functionalism,” in J. C.Smith (ed.), Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science , Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.
• –––, 1982. “Wille and Willkür in Kant’s Theory of Action,” in Moltke S. Gram (ed.), Interpreting Kant , Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 69–84.
• Merritt, Melissa, 2018. Kant on Reflection and Virtue , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mohr, Georg, 1991. Das sinnliche Ich. Innerer Sinn und Bewußtsein bei Kant , Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann.
• Neiman, Susan, 1997. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Newton, Alexandra, 2019. “Kant and the transparency of the mind,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 49(7): 890–915.
• Peters, Julia, 2018. “Kant’s Gesinnung”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 56(3): 497–518.
• Pippin, R., 1987. “Kant on the spontaneity of mind”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 17: 449–476.
• –––, 1982. Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason , New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
• Powell, C. Thomas, 1990. Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Reinhold, Carl Leonhard, 1790 [1975]. “Erörterung des Begriffs von der Freiheit des Willens”, in Materialien zu Kants “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft” , Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
• Rosefeldt, Tobias, 2000. Das logische Ich: Kant über den Gehalt des Begriffes von sich selbst (Monographien zur philosophischen Forschung), Berlin: Philo.
• Rosenberg, Jay F., 1987. “‘I Think’: Some Reflections on Kant’s Paralogisms”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy , 10: 503–30.
• Sassen, B., 2000. Kant’s Early Critics , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Schwyzer, Hubert, 1990. The Unity of Understanding: A Study in Kantian Problems , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Scruton, R., 2011. Kant , New York: Sterling Publishers.
• Sedgwick, S., 2007. The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Senderovicz, Y.M., 2005. The Coherence of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (Studies in German Idealism), Berlin: Springer.
• Sellars, W., 1970. “…this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks…”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association , 44: 5–31.
• Serck-Hanssen, Camilla, 2009. “Kant on Consciousness”, in Psychology and Philosophy , Sara Heinämaa (ed.), Berlin: Springer, 139–157.
• Sgarbi, M., 2012. Kant on Spontaneity , London: Continuum Press.
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• Zammito, John H., 2002. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Other References

• Brook, A., 2001, “The unity of consciousness”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2001 Edition) , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2001/entries/consciousness-unity/ >.
• Brook, A. and DeVidi, R. (eds.), 2001. Self-Reference and Self-Awareness , Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Perry, J., 2001, “The essential indexical”, in Brook and DeVidi 2001.
• Shoemaker, S., 1968. “Self-reference and self-awareness”, in Brook and DeVidi (eds.) 2001
• –––, 1970. “Persons and their pasts”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 7: 269–285.
• Treisman, A., and Glade, G., 1980. “A feature-integration theory of attention”, Cognitive Psychology , 12: 97–136.
• Wittgenstein, L., 1934–5. Blue and Brown Books , Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers.

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• North American Kant Society (NAKS) .

a priori justification and knowledge | consciousness: unity of | Descartes, René | functionalism | idealism | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: and Hume on causality | Kant, Immanuel: and Hume on morality | Kant, Immanuel: philosophy of science | Kant, Immanuel: transcendental arguments | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Reid, Thomas | self-consciousness

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Paul Guyer, Paul Raymont, Rick DeVidi, Julian Wuerth, Kirsta Anderson, and an anonymous referee for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for very helpful comments.

Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Brook Julian Wuerth < julian . wuerth @ vanderbilt . edu >

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