نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی- پژوهشی
نویسنده
School of Philosophy & Culture Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسنده [English]
Kant’s theory of transcendental subjectivity develops in response to Cartesian scepticism. Kant criticises Descartes for trying to prove the existence of the external world based on his indubitable existence as a conscious, immaterial substance. Whereas Descartes, being a rationalist, counters scepticism about the external world by grounding knowledge in the consciousness of the self, for Kant, the existence of the external world is one of the two preconditions for human knowledge. Further, Kant avoids scepticism by introducing a transcendental subject vis-à-vis the Cartesian immaterial self as a real substance, where the transcendental subject is a formal condition of all possible knowledge. The paper critically examines Quassim Cassam’s materialist conception of self-consciousness, which treats the self as a bodily subject among other physical objects in the physical world, against his claim that the Kantian notion of transcendental self-consciousness as a formal condition supports the “exclusion thesis”, which proves the self to be an elusive entity because it can never be an object of self-consciousness. The paper argues that Kant’s transcendental subjectivity does not make the self elusive but only indicates that the very structure of self-awareness functions to maintain the self-notself distinction so essential for survival, and concludes with a brief response to Priest’s argument that we need the Cartesian self-substance as the bearer of metaphysical properties against Kant’s notion of the formal self.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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