From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic and with the character of the experiencing self. In this study, Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, showing that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key to understanding both Kant's critique of "rational psychology" and his theory of self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent...
From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the natur...