Document Type : Original Article
Abstract
Kant's entirely Copernican approach to philosophy originates from the concept of mind (self) and its specific faculties. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes three major faculties for the mind: Sensation, Understanding, and Apperception, while also emphasizing on the distinction between their transcendental and empirical applications. The transcendental application of these faculties is discussed in the First Critique. He gives the title “transcendental" to his method in analyzing the mind and faculties of Knowledge, trying to separate his work from other psychological approaches; (whether or not he is successful in this, will be addressed later). But the empirical application of these faculties, which will be examined in Anthropology, in part gets close to some of the discussions in the realm of psychology. This issue has made some commentators to claim that Kant had deviated from his Anti-psychological stance in Anthropology, having presented discussions that he was trying to reject in the First Critique. Thus in this article we focus on the third faculty, that is, “self-consciousness” or “Apperception;” we try to answer questions and shed light on vagueness as the follows: Can we regard Kant's approach as a psychological stance, given the fact that he emphasizes on the empirical characteristics of faculty in Anthropology (particularly self-consciousness, developmental stages and progression of this faculty in human beings)? What distinguishes Kant’s approach toward self-consciousness in the Anthropology from his approach in the First Critique and also from other Anthropological approaches? In general, our main goal in this paper is to address differences between Kant's approach to "self" in the First Critique and in the Anthropology, while also showing that despite Kant's effort to separate his discussions from other Psychological discussions – particularly in its discussions of self-consciousness – his approach to the issue, whether in Anthropology or in the First Critique, is in some cases close to psychological discussions.
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