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Immanuel Kant
Also known as: Kant
Facts (30)
Sources
Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 13 facts
claimImmanuel Kant claims that transcendental apperception, a form of self-awareness, is required to account for the unity of conscious experience over time.
claimThe 'Heidelberg School' interprets Johann Gottlieb Fichte as claiming that previous accounts of self-consciousness by René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant are 'reflective' because they regard the self as an object rather than a subject.
claimC. Thomas Powell analyzed Immanuel Kant's theory of self-consciousness in his 1990 book 'Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness'.
referenceImmanuel Kant's First Critique (1781/1787) utilizes the claim that there is no conscious awareness of the self in arguments such as the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms.
claimImmanuel Kant argues that there is no intuition of the self through which the self is given as an object.
claimEdmund Husserl initially denied the inner awareness of a 'pure ego' in his early work, but later revised this view to resemble Immanuel Kant's transcendental apperception.
referenceP.F. Strawson analyzed Immanuel Kant's philosophy in the 1966 book 'The Bounds of Sense'.
referenceImmanuel Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (1781/1787) was edited by Paul Guyer and Alan Wood and published by Cambridge University Press in 1997.
claimAccording to Immanuel Kant, the representation of the self in the 'I think' is purely formal and is exhausted by its function in unifying experience.
claimDuring the early modern period, self-consciousness became a central topic in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, particularly through the work of Immanuel Kant and the post-Kantians.
claimP.F. Strawson, in his discussion of Immanuel Kant's transcendental deduction, articulates the claim that if different experiences are to belong to a single consciousness, the subject of those experiences must have the possibility of self-consciousness.
claimImmanuel Kant argues that a subject must be able to comprehend their manifold representations in a single consciousness to call them their own, otherwise the self would be as diverse as the representations themselves.
claimArthur Schopenhauer concurred with Immanuel Kant's view that the subject becoming an object for itself is a contradiction.
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Jun 18, 2004 6 facts
claimImmanuel Kant (1787) and Edmund Husserl (1929) argued that the intentional coherence of the experiential domain relies on a dual interdependence between the self as a perspective and the world as an integrated structure of objects and events.
claimImmanuel Kant (1787) noted that the "I think" must at least potentially accompany every conscious experience, even if the self does not appear as an explicit element within that experience.
referenceImmanuel Kant (1787) and Edmund Husserl (1913) argue that individual conscious experience depends on its location within a larger unified structure of representation, which includes awareness of one's existence as a temporally extended observer within a world of spatially connected objects.
claimImmanuel Kant (1787), Edmund Husserl (1913), and subsequent phenomenologists demonstrated that the phenomenal structure of experience is intentional and includes complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, and the world.
perspectiveImmanuel Kant critiqued the purely associationist approach to consciousness in 1787, arguing that an adequate account of experience and phenomenal consciousness requires a complex structure of mental and intentional organization.
claimImmanuel Kant argued that phenomenal consciousness cannot be a mere succession of associated ideas, but must be the experience of a conscious self situated in an objective world structured by space, time, and causality.
Self-Consciousness - Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science oecs.mit.edu Jul 24, 2024 4 facts
claimImmanuel Kant denied that introspection presents humans with any sort of self-as-object, echoing an insight previously held by David Hume.
quoteImmanuel Kant wrote in the Critique of pure reason: “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.”
claimImmanuel Kant introduced the idea that self-consciousness is interdependent with consciousness of an external objective world, asserting that one can only be aware of oneself to the extent that one experiences an organized world of objects that interact causally and predictably.
claimImmanuel Kant argued that it is a condition of all thought that it be self-conscious in the sense of being attributed to a thinker, meaning one cannot think without thinking that one is oneself thinking.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Springer Nature Link link.springer.com 3 facts
claimThe mind-body problem became the central question of epistemology and modern philosophy due to the problematization of the mind and its relation to reality by René Descartes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.
perspectivevon Stillfried (2018) argues that David Chalmers' definition of consciousness is circular because, if experience is assumed to be the only intrinsic evidence, the causal structure of time-space cannot be differentiated from cognitive structures, a problem previously demonstrated by David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
claimGeorge Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant contested the possibility of acquiring reliable knowledge about the physical world.
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness - David Chalmers consc.net 1 fact
quoteDavid Chalmers paraphrases Immanuel Kant to describe the relationship between the hard and easy problems of consciousness: 'hard without easy is empty; easy without hard is blind.'
Critique of Panpsychism: Philosophical Coherence and Scientific ... thequran.love May 7, 2025 1 fact
claimThe 'no-summing argument' against panpsychism contends that combining conscious subjects is logically impossible because conscious subjects are inherently indivisible unities, a concept historically associated with Leibniz and Kant.
Panpsychism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 18, 2017 1 fact
claimArthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) theorized that 'will' is the inner nature of all things, based on his introspection of will as a fundamental quality, while being influenced by Immanuel Kant's view that reality as it is in itself is inaccessible.
AI Sessions #9: The Case Against AI Consciousness (with Anil Seth) conspicuouscognition.com Feb 17, 2026 1 fact
claimAnil Seth argues that treating entities that appear conscious as if they are not conscious is psychologically harmful to humans, citing arguments dating back to Immanuel Kant.