The problem of self-knowledge in Kant's critique of pure reason

Date

2010

Author

Haşar, Ekim

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The self-knowledge has been a central problem throughout the history of philosophy, but it has remained, as Kant also declares, as the ―most difficult‖ of all tasks of reason. In this study, I scrutinize the grounds of this difficulty and search for the answers to the question ―what can we comprehend about the notion of self from a Kantian standpoint?‖ In this respect, this study is a reading of Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason with the focus of the problem of self-knowledge. We can see that this concept has a very substantial role in Kantian philosophy but it is not easy to derive a complete theory therefrom. He asserts three different conceptions of the self: the phenomenal self (the self as appears to oneself), the transcendental subject (the self as a transcendental condition of knowledge), and the noumenal self (the self as the free agent of one‘s actions). The problem is that there is no unity among these conceptions, and thus they do not have a common ground to indicate the existence of the self as a distinct unique entity. This study examines this problem along with the fundamental arguments of transcendental philosophy.

Subject Keywords

Apperception., Self-knowledge, Theory of., Transcendental logic.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612765/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/20194

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis