Dennis Schulting - Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism

Per Cristiana, per sempre

Also available from Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Companion to Kant, ed. Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting, Nigel Hems

The German Idealism Reader, ed. Marina F. Bykova

The Schelling Reader, ed. Benjamin Berger, Daniel Whistler

Hegel on Possibility, Nahum Brown

Hegel, Logic and Speculation, ed. Paolo Diego Bubbio, Alessandro De Cesaris, Maurizio Pagano, Hager Weslati

In my previous two monographs, Kants Deduction From Apperception. An Essay on the Transcendental Deduction (second edition, De Gruyter, 2018) and Kants Radical Subjectivism. Perspectives on the Transcendental Deduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), I wrote in detail about the arguments Kant puts forward in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. In the present book I look more specifically, both systematically and historically, at one central element of Kants reasoning in the Deduction in particular, and in the Critique of Pure Reason in general. This concerns transcendental apperception or transcendental consciousness, and the relation apperception has to self-consciousness more commonly understood. This aspect is a common thread in Kants philosophy and the thought of his successors in German Idealism; it also links Kant to a neglected aspect of his rationalist predecessors thought, that of Leibniz and Wolff in particular. Some of the arguments discussed here have been covered, in a different manner, in the two earlier aforementioned books, but there are additional new discussions of especially figures like Reinhold and Fichte as well as Leibniz and Wolff, and more in particular Hegel. The theme of this book is however a unitary one: the centrality of transcendental apperception and self-consciousness both in Kants philosophy and for the project of German Idealism.

Some of the material presented here is rehearsed from papers published earlier elsewhere. I am grateful to editors for permission to retain copyright for the articles involved. The subject matter in Chapter 2 goes back to an article first published in Dutch, under the title, Wat is eigenlijk copernicaans aan Kants copernicaanse revolutie?, in Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100(1) (2008): 4166. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published under the title Transcendental Apperception and Consciousness in Kants Lectures on Metaphysics in Robert Clewis (ed.), Reading Kants Lectures (De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 89113. Material in Chapters 4 and 7 is based on papers that appeared in The Palgrave Kant Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), ch. 7, and the edited volume Kantian Nonconceptualism (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), ch. 10, respectively. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published in Kant Yearbook 8 (2016): 87116.

I am grateful yet again to Christian Onof for his invaluable comments on the penultimate draft of the book. Thanks are also due to Sacha Golob, who critically engaged, with his usual rigour, with my previous book Kants Radical Subjectivism, and to whom I respond in Chapter 5; and to Paul Giladi, who critiqued my earlier reading of Hegels critique of Kant (see for a response Chapter 9). I further thank Kees Jan Brons, who read an earlier version of Chapter 8. I am certain our approaches have now reached a point of convergence when it comes to understanding Hegels intimate relation to Kant.

All English language quotations from Kants works in this book are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. P. Guyer & A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992ff.), except for the following: The Prolegomena is used in the Ellington/Carus edition (see details in the bibliography), but sometimes I make use of the Cambridge translation. Occasionally, I make use of Kemp Smiths translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bastingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 [1929]). Where a translation was not available I provided my own. The following abbreviations are used for Kants works: