Kant's Perceiver

Abstract

Who or what is Kant’s thinker? Both in the book under discussion (2011), and in her Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (1990), Patricia Kitcher takes the appealing view that Kant’s thinker is a human being, a part of the natural order. His or her knowledge of objects arises not from affection by noumena outside of space and time, but from the effects of spatio-temporal objects on her sense-organs. And the various “syntheses” which bring about the transition from sensory effects to more sophisticated forms of representation are, to a large extent, the stuff of empirical psychology and neuroscience. The present book departs from the earlier one, however, in its attention to the idea that Kant’s thinker is a rational being. While remaining a spatio-temporal human being affected by other spatio-temporal objects, she is capable not only of processing sensory information so as to arrive at knowledge of those objects, but also of appreciating the rational grounds of that knowledge. She not only finds herself in mental states which carry information about how things are around her, she also grasps rational relations among her states, recognizing, for example, her judgment that something is a body as rationally grounded on the judgment that it is extended (8), or her judgment that the puppy is in the room as rationally grounded on her perception that it is by the window (5, 139). This is the key to Kitcher’s interpretation of the