What is the Idea of the Soul? Comments on Katharina Kraus, Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation

Abstract

AbstractThese remarks focus on Kraus’s claim that for Kant the category of substance cannot apply to the soul but that instead we can and should apply a merely regulative idea of the soul. While granting Kraus’s contention that we require an idea of the soul in order to investigate inner experience, I argue that the category of substance nonetheless applies to the soul, but that the notion of the soul as entirely non-corporeal is a regulative idea. To explore this contention, I closely examine two crucial passages Kraus uses to argue against parity between inner and outer sense.