Transcendental Arguments for Personal Identity in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction

Abstract

One of the principle aims of the B version of Kant's transcenden- tal deduction is to show how it is possible that the same 'I think' can accom- pany all of my representations, which is a transcendental condition of the possibility of judgment. Contra interpreters such as A. Brook, show that this 'I think' is an a priori (reflective) self-consciousness; contra P. Keller, show that this a priori self-consciousness is first and foremost a conscious- ness of one's personal from a first person point of view. Are there good transcendental arguments for the persistence of the self throughout changes in its representational states? Kant's transcendental deduction can be read as such an argument. This paper provides a recon- struction of the B-edition of Kant's Transcendental Deduction in terms of what Dieter Henrich has termed an identity deduction, 1 namely, an analy- sis of the conditions of the possibility for cognizing the I think necessary for both concept formation and judgment. On this reading, a significant aim of the transcendental deduction (TD) is to show that only through an a priori transcendental employment of the categories can the I think be determined at all. Hence, such an a priori transcendental employment must be presupposed for even the most rudimentary empirical judgments to be possible. Such an analysis of the TD, as one whose fundamental problem is the establishment of the conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, is consistent with view- ing the B-edition version of the deduction as a single proof in two steps: 2