Kant's Psychologism, Part I

Abstract

In this paper, I shall argue that the most moderate and balanced way to view Kant's transcendental philosophy is as a species of psychological investigation analogous to Hume's, but refounded on a doctrine of pure (a priori) sensibility, such as Hume never allowed himself (and may never even have thought of). This might seem to fly in the face of what many interpreters of Kant deem conventional wisdom: that the burden of proof is on one who claims that psychology is essential to transcendental philosophy. On this view, there is to be found in Kant ‘a more austere strictly transcendental philosophy’, which needs to be carefully distinguished from the psychological doctrines in which it is enmeshed; and they would insist on being convinced of the contrary before abandoning a position that, in their eyes, is the most moderate and balanced an interpreter of Kant can adopt. My purpose in this two-part essay is to urge them to think again. For while there can be no question of Kant's opposition to empiricism, it is equally certain that his praise for Hume was never freer or more unreserved than in respect of the latter's psycho-genetic approach to cognition. So, rather than supposing that Kant ipso facto rejected solutions to philosophical problems grounded on psychology when he rejected Hume's empiricism, it seems to me that the more moderate and balanced interpretive approach is to begin by supposing that Kant's transcendental philosophy is a species of philosophical psychology in the same mould as Hume's, differing from it only by virtue of involving a priori syntheses of a manifold of a priori intuition.