Rational Psychology Research Articles

Understanding the First Paralogism: A Friendly Disagreement

Abstract My comments focus on Proops’s treatment of the Paralogisms. I agree with many aspects of his discussion, including his views about the project of Rational Psychology and his analyses of how, exactly, the arguments of the Paralogisms are defective in form, but I disagree with his interpretation of the First Paralogism. I argue that the source of confusion that Kant diagnoses is not the grammatical distribution of ‘I’ as singular, but the fact that the I-representation is both empty and necessary for cognition.

The Impact of Anna Terruwe on the Work of Conrad Baars

In his autobiography Doctor of the Heart, Conrad Baars (1996) recounted his desire to leave the profession of psychiatry until he discovered the Dutch neuropsychiatrist Anna Terruwe through her writings on Thomistic rational psychology in conceptualizing, treating, and preventing neurosis. He immediately began a partnership with her that continued until his death in 1981. Baars (1982) acknowledged that before discovering Terruwe's work, he did not believe he was “getting anywhere in bringing about true healing” (p. 347). He named Terruwe the discoverer of deprivation neuroses and attributed to her their treatment models for several types of repressive neurosis (Baars, 1959, 1960). An exploration of the legacy of Baars therefore benefits from understanding Terruwe's collaboration with him and her contributions to psychiatry grounded in her philosophical and theological understanding of the human person (Baars, 1981). This article introduces Terruwe, her relationship to Baars, and her theories of neurosis and affirmation that Terruwe and Baars applied to their treatment of individuals, married people, consecrated religious, and priests. Because affirmation is a concept of Terruwe's that Baars widely promoted in the United States and with which he is often associated today, this article offers a detailed summary of her book The Abode of Love in which she formulates the concept of affirmation through a reflection on the meaning, operation, and significance of human love as fundamental for happiness in general, in marriage, and in the priesthood (Ware, 1970).

Introduction

It is a privilege to be able to introduce the readers of Integratus to the life and work of my father, Catholic psychiatrist Conrad Baars. A survivor of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, he became disillusioned with the secular Freudian approach to therapeutic intervention. Through the hand of Providence, he was introduced to the work of Dr. Anna Terruwe, which changed the trajectory of his life and career. Terruwe, a Dutch Catholic psychiatrist, had been successful in pioneering the rational psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas as the foundation for her work with clients with obsessive compulsive symptoms. In addition, she identified a syndrome in adults caused by a deprivation of love in childhood. Terruwe realized that these persons needed the remedy of someone's receptive, affective presence, which she called affirmation. She observed that contrary to some of the more active treatments, it was crucial to simply be with rather than do much with these persons.

The Impact of Investors Overconfidence Bias on Investment Strategy Based on Behavioral Finance

As international financial markets continue to diversify and become more complex, the application of behavioral finance in financial markets is becoming more and more widespread. At the same time, as people's living standards continue to rise, the securities market is a relatively optimal investment choice. To protect the wealth of investors and improve the standard of living of the nation, it is essential to ensure the stability of the investment market, which forces us to study the impact of imperfectly rational behavior on the stock market. Overconfidence bias is one of the most common types of imperfectly rational psychology. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the impact of overconfidence on investment portfolios. This paper aims to examine the effect of overconfidence bias on an investor's investment strategy through a literature review and empirical methods. The paper concludes that overconfidence bias shows a different relationship with return yield in the initial, completion, and diminishing periods. Secondly, overconfidence bias for investors exists. The characteristics of better-than-average-effect (BTAE) and the illusion of control have different effects on trading volume, return volatility, and market efficiency, and the role of contrarian investment strategy (CIS) in overcoming this bias is discussed.

Чистая и нечистая философия в метафилософии Канта

Kant’s metaphilosophy has three main parts: (1) an essentialist project (“What is philosophy?”); (2) a methodological project (“How do we do philosophy?”); and (3) a taxonomic project (“What are the different parts of philosophy, and how are they related?”). This paper focuses on the third project. In particular, it explores one of the most intriguing yet puzzling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, viz. the relationship between what Kant calls ‘pure’ philosophy vs. ‘applied’, ‘empirical’ or what we can broadly refer to as ‘impure’ philosophy. (As we shall see, in order to be able to address this third project, we shall also need to examine the other two projects in detail.) My plan is as follows. First, I discuss four main areas of pure vs. impure philosophy: (i) ‘pure logic’ vs. ‘applied logic’; (ii) ‘rational psychology’ vs. ‘empirical psychology’; (iii) ‘pure metaphysics of nature’ vs. ‘physics’ and (iv) ‘pure morality’ or a ‘metaphysics of morals’ vs. ‘moral anthropology’, ‘practical anthropology’ or ‘applied moral philosophy’. Based on this, I identify four key differences between pure and impure philosophy. Second, I critically examine four different readings of Kant’s views about the status of ‘impure’ philosophy: (a) that it is not genuine philosophy; (b) that it is bad or inferior philosophy; (c) that it is instrumentally valuable; and (d) that it constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy, both in a theoretical and practical sense. I argue that Kant is best interpreted as endorsing readings (c) and (d). Third, I offer some concluding remarks.

Kant's Radicalization of Cartesian Foundationalism: Thought Experiments, Transcendental Arguments, and Level Circularity in the Paralogisms

AbstractKant's critique of rational psychology is a thought experiment that targets no individual or school, but rather the natural tendency of human reason to “hypostatize” the highest intellectual condition of all cognition (the pure ‘I think’) as though it were itself a cognition of the ‘I.’ To do so is to violate the very anti-circularity stricture also at work in Kant's better-known transcendental critiques of Locke and Hume. Along with a new type of circularity (level circularity), this article proposes a conception of transcendental arguments different from that of most contemporary debates regarding empiricism, naturalism, and Cartesian foundationalism.

Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation by Katharina T. Kraus

Reviewed by: Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation by Katharina T. Kraus Stefanie Buchenau Katharina T. Kraus. Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 306. Hardback, $96.06. According to conventional wisdom, Kant demolished the traditional idea of the soul in his Critique of Pure Reason. By denying the human mind any theoretical or intuitive knowledge of the soul as an immaterial substance and referring this idea to an illusory tendency of the mind, he efficiently tore down a longstanding metaphysical discipline called rational psychology. Katherina Kraus’s aim is to challenge this conventional reading. In her new book Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, she claims that Kant’s true intention was to transform rather than demolish the idea of the immaterial soul. Her main argument, nourished by a close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, is that despite this transformation, the idea of the soul does retain a positive function, serving as a regulative idea of reason and providing a “guiding thread” of inner experience. Such an idea, she states, offers the wider context for the acquisition of empirical self-knowledge and for self-formation, as a presentation or projection (Darstellung) of a mental whole in relation to which we can first determine inner experiences, without cognizing the whole as such. This regulative principle allows the soul to unfold its function, “as if the mind [Gemüth] were a simple substance that, with personal identity, persistently exists,” as Kant himself puts it in his Critique of Pure Reason (A 672/B 700). Kraus explores the manifold dimensions of this idea in three parts, rising from the level of inner perception to concepts and ideas. In the first part, on self-perception, reflexivity, and referentiality, she outlines an “interactional” model of the soul, self-knowledge, and self-feeling, which is based on the correlation between object-consciousness and self-consciousness. According to Kraus, some kind of inward-directed consciousness is constitutive of the empirical consciousness of objects. Consciousness depends on the [End Page 515] direction of the mind’s attention to itself, and its capacity to distinguish itself from the external world (30). Drawing on Wolffian psychology, Kant develops a novel account of this interactional model. He comes back to a hylomorphic pattern where sensibility, in its twofold empirical and transcendental dimension, is a receptivity to matter in analogy with outer sense, and transcendental self-affection is the a priori determination of the form of sense through the understanding. In part 2, Kraus moves from sensibility and self-perception to the level of understanding and consciousness. Against the psychological and the logical views mostly defended in the existing literature, she argues that the apperceptive “I think” should not be understood as a judgment or as a representation that is about something—neither about an empirical thinker nor about a logical subject (84). Instead, transcendental apperception is the capacity for reflexive consciousness in general. The phrase ‘I think’ is an expression of self-presence. Chapter 4 enquires into the conditions of self-reference. It proposes a novel reading of the Paralogisms, showing in what sense they offer a positive contribution to defining a set of legitimate logical and psychological modes of self-representation. While both sets are distinct and while the category of persistence cannot be applied to inner intuitions, the logical “I” remains relevant for the way in which I refer to myself in experience (148) and in which I represent myself as a psychological “I” and as the same person throughout time (160). This mode of reference appeals to the faculty of reason rather than to the understanding. According to the third part, on reason as the faculty of ideas, the mind here relies on a regulative idea of the soul projecting a totality that is not yet given. This important claim offers the framework for a better understanding of inner experience as being an empirical self-cognition. According to chapter 6, such self-cognition requires some attitude of assent and an epistemic ground for holding such a cognition to be true. Within this paradigm, one can distinguish various levels of self-knowledge, where the highest level (i...

Where Do All These Ideas Come From? Kant on the Formation of Concepts Under the Guidance of Pure Reason

Abstract It is not just rationalist metaphysics, but also Kant’s transcendental philosophy that is teeming with a priori concepts. According to Kant, some of these a priori concepts are “ideas,” and similar to the categories, some of these ideas in turn belong to the nature of human reason, while others can be derived from them. It is therefore part of Kant’s claim in the “Transcendental Dialectic” to be able to explain not only the leading ideas of rational psychology, cosmology, and theology as natural concepts of reason, but the origin of the entire a priori vocabulary of the metaphysica specialis as well. This article outlines how Kant’s derivations of these concepts work. After explaining Kant’s classification of a priori concepts and the derivation of the transcendental ideas, his derivations are explored in more detail using the example of the concepts of the pure doctrine of the soul. This contributes to a better understanding of Kant’s theory of philosophical concepts while also shedding light on the rather rarely treated topic of the “Transcendental Dialectic.”

Kant’s Letter to Fichte, the Pure Intellect and his ‘All-Crushing’ Metaphysics: Comments on De Boer’s Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics

AbstractI raise three questions relevant to De Boer’s overall project in Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. The first is whether Kant’s 1799 open letter to Fichte supports or threatens her contention that Kant had an abiding interest in developing a reformed metaphysics from 1781 onwards. The second is whether De Boer’s conception of the pure intellect and its place in Kant’s projected system of metaphysics captures the role of pure sensibility in the Analytic of Principles, rational physics and rational psychology. The third is whether one might accept the outline of this system as De Boer develops it while still holding that it is more accurate to characterize it as revolution rather than reform.

Kants kritische Psychologie als Aufklärung

In his famous essay from 1784, Kant denied that we "live in an enlightened age"; yet he claimed that we "live in an age of enlightenment". If we should answer the question if we live in an enlightened age now, we could basically give the same answer. The enlightenment as an ongoing process can be found throughout Kant's whole work. This article focuses on how the concept of enlightenment can be applied to the Kantian psychology, which marks an important change of theory of the soul within modern western metaphysics. Kant's idea of enlightenment and 'critique' will be illustrated with reference to the "Paralogisms" of the Critique of Pure Reason. Finally, an analysis of some passages of the "Paralogisms" shall demonstrate that Kant's critique of the previous metaphysical doctrine of the human soul should not be understood as a complete rejection of this doctrine; rather, Kant's critique of what is called rational psychology should be understood as a critical transformation.

For a metaphysics out of joint: Deleuze, Heidegger: Pathways between metaphysics and transcendental philosophy

In Heidegger the ontological difference is one between any intra-worldly entities and the very horizon of their appearing, the world itself. Both E. Fink and J.-P. Sartre elaborated on this, and so further did Deleuze; even his and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus draws ultimately on the utterly Heideggerian idea of an ontological difference as one between world and worldly entities. Now the very architecture of traditional (Wolffian) special metaphysics – although programmatically entity-oriented – gets thereby affected, namely in its first part, rational psychology. From Heidegger through Fink and Sartre until Deleuze, the move of opening the metaphysical dimension of thought to the transcendental one in order to do justice to the ontological difference goes along with that of blowing psychology up (and indeed psyche itself) within the very domain of metaphysics.

For a metaphysics out of joint: Deleuze, Heidegger: Pathways between metaphysics and transcendental philosophy

In Heidegger the ontological difference is one between any intra-worldly entities and the very horizon of their appearing, the world itself. Both E. Fink and J.-P. Sartre elaborated on this, and so further did Deleuze; even his and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus draws ultimately on the utterly Heideggerian idea of an ontological difference as one between world and worldly entities. Now the very architecture of traditional (Wolffian) special metaphysics – although programmatically entity-oriented – gets thereby affected, namely in its first part, rational psychology. From Heidegger through Fink and Sartre until Deleuze, the move of opening the metaphysical dimension of thought to the transcendental one in order to do justice to the ontological difference goes along with that of blowing psychology up (and indeed psyche itself) within the very domain of metaphysics.

The Fall of Satan, Rational Psychology, and the Division of Consciousness: A Girardian Thought Experiment

This paper proposes a revision of Girard’s interpretation of Satan, along traditional theological lines. Appreciating the essential correctness of the Girardian characterization of mimēsis, it is an argument, contra Girard, that (1) Satan cannot be reduced to a mimetic process but is a hypostatic spiritual reality and, following from this, that (2) the origins of mimetic rivalry go back before the emergence of humankind and provide a model for human rivalry. Employing concepts drawn from Husserlian phenomenological psychology, Thomist theology, and psychoanalysis, it hypothesizes Satan’s psychological state, prior to his fall, as metastable anxiety and trauma and his state, afterwards, as a narcissistic, malicious, self-induced pathology in order to explain Satan’s impossible rivalry with God, a rivalry that precedes hominization and has always endangered human existence.

From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Economicus: The Transformation of the Human Subject in Polish Socialist Economic Thought

Whereas both classical and neoclassical economists based their theories on a static psychology of self-maximizing rationality that facilitated the formulation of universal economic laws, Marx proposed instead an evolutionary understanding of the human psyche, opening the possibility of dynamic economic laws that mutated in accordance with changing historical contexts. By the 1920s and 1930s, some socialist economists started to drift away from this position, arguing instead that the psychology of neoclassical microeconomics could sustain a socialist macroeconomics, as long as the necessary institutions were in place. In other words, they came to believe that Homo Economicus could maintain all his or her selfish desires and acquisitive inclinations, but if economic structures were property designed and if the state enforced certain rules and regulations, then exploitation and commodification would be vanquished and the pursuit of individual well-being would lead to collective prosperity. That line of thinking was shut down within the Soviet bloc by Stalin, who insisted that socialism could only be created if Homo Economicus was transformed into Homo Sovieticus. Among economists prior to 1956, an evolutionary understanding of the human psyche was not only promoted but vigorously enforced by the state. After the fall of the Stalinists, however, a neoclassical approach regained the upper hand, and economists (not to mention politicians) in the Soviet Bloc began to lose their faith in meaningful anthropological and historical change.

Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul: The Case of Victor Cousin

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the end result, severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show (1) that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; (2) that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and (3) that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac.

Formal versus Bounded Norms in the Psychology of Rationality: Toward a Multilevel Analysis of Their Relationship

It is often claimed that formal and optimizing norms of the standard conception of rationality and the heuristics of the bounded rationality approach are at odds with one another. This claim, I argue, is an overly complex one. In order to discuss it adequately, I introduce two sets of distinctions: (a) a system of different kinds of relations between conceptions of rationality, namely relations of elimination, compatibility, and complementarity, and (b) three different levels of possible relations between rules of different theories of rationality—the levels of empirical explanation, normative justification, and normative prescription. I argue that formal and bounded rules are compatible and complementary at the levels of explanation and justification, but probably not so at the level of prescription.

The Spiration of Love in God according to Aquinas and His Interpreters

The Spiration of Love in God according to Aquinas and His Interpreters Jeremy D. Wilkins "Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror quocumque feror."1 Augustine "Contemplatio spiritualis pulchritudinis vel bonitatis est principium amoris spiritualis."2 Thomas Aquinas THE HOLY SPIRIT, according to Thomas Aquinas's teaching in the Summa theologiae, proceeds from the Father and the Son in the mode of will (per modum voluntatis), as proceeding love (amor procedens), as the beloved in the lover (amatum in amante), as an inclination to and impression of the beloved (inclinatio, impressio).3 Both the Scholastic commentary tradition and more recent scholarship attest to a problem of interpretation regarding these assertions. Interpreters do not agree about (1) whether the will emanates an operatum, parallel in some way to the procession of the inner word within the intellect; (2) what is meant by the beloved in the lover; (3) what, exactly, Aquinas's analogue for the procession of the Spirit is; and (4) how Aquinas uses the one name, "love," to [End Page 357] denote (a) an essential attribute of God, (b) a personal property of the Spirit, and (c) a notional act of the Father and the Son. The chief question regards the operatum in, or from, the will. One line of interpretation, classically represented by John of St. Thomas (Poinsot) and lately promoted by Gilles Emery, takes the beloved in the lover to be a product or term in the will emanating from the act of love, as the inner word is a reality in the intellect emanating from the act of understanding. On this interpretation, there are two acts called love, one emanated from the other: a basic act of love, and a derivative act described as love's fruit, impress, or impulse, but also called love. It is this derivation of one act of love from another, according to the majority of interpreters, that provides Aquinas's analogue for spiration in God. A minority report, however, urged most explicitly by Bernard Lonergan and others under his influence, but possibly found also in Cajetan, takes the beloved in the lover to be the act of love itself, emanating into the will from the inner word in the intellect. This reading denies that the impress or impulse of love is anything other than the act of love itself; affective momentum is not something love produces, but is just what love is (as Augustine suggests in the remark quoted in epigraph). The problem has psychological, theological, and exegetical aspects. Fundamentally, the question lies in the field of rational psychology. Either the psychological facts can be determined clearly and exactly, or they cannot. But insofar as the matter at hand is an interpretation of Aquinas, our concern shall be to determine as best we can how he understood the psychological facts, leaving to the side an evaluation of his views. To this question of psychological fact is annexed a theological issue. We develop an imperfect but fruitful understanding of the mysteries by analogy with realities more familiar to us. But if the more familiar realities are themselves shrouded in mystery, we are moving per ignotum ad ignotius. The more familiar reality Aquinas takes for his Trinitarian analogue purports to be a structure of acts within our rational consciousness, but he has [End Page 358] been accused of rigging the system.4 In the measure that accusation is sustained, his achievement is not theoretical illumination but at best a coherent restatement of the truths of faith. Verbal coherence is not nothing, of course, but neither is it the imperfect but fruitful understanding that is the aim of systematic theology. If, then, we ourselves wish analogically to conceive how (and not merely coherently to assert that) divine understanding utters an inner word spirating love, we must first grasp as clearly as possible how our own understanding utters an inner word spirating love. In the measure that these psychological facts are obscure to us, the illuminating substance of theory is exchanged for a merely verbal coherence; we are left with a model that is unverified, opaque, or contrived, and a set of syntactical rules for applying it to the Trinity. Finally, there is the direct locus...

Transcendental Paralogisms as Formal Fallacies - Kant’s Refutation of Pure Rational Psychology

Abstract: According to Kant, the arguments of rational psychology are formal fallacies that he calls transcendental paralogisms. It remains heavily debated whether there actually is any formal error in the inferences Kant presents: according to Grier and Allison, they are deductively invalid syllogisms, whereas Bennett, Ameriks, and Van Cleve deny that they are formal fallacies. I advance an interpretation that reconciles these extremes: transcendental paralogisms are sound in general logic but constitute formal fallacies in transcendental logic. By formalising the paralogistic inference, I will pinpoint the error as an illegitimate existential presupposition. Since - unlike transcendental logic - general logic abstracts from all objects, this error can only be detected in transcendental logic.

Kant’s Politics in Context by Reidar Maliks, and: Kant and Rational Psychology by Corey W. Dyck

Kant’s Politics in Context by Reidar Maliks, and: Kant and Rational Psychology by Corey W. Dyck

What Can Humans Cognize about the Self from Experience? Comments on Corey Dyck’s “The Development of Kant’s Psychology during the 1770’s”

I agree with Dyck’s basic claim that Kant follows the methodology of Rational Psychology in setting up his critique of it: He starts as it starts, with an existential proposition ‘I think.’ On the other hand, I am not convinced of Dyck’s use of the Dreams essay in establishing a timeline for the development of Kant’s views on inner sense. That essay is evidence that Kant thinks that Schwendenborg’s metaphysics is ungrounded, because he has a crazy sort of inner sense, but it does not show that Kant rejected a more standard internal sense at this time. I also suggest that some of Kant’s vacillation about inner sense depends on an unusual feature of his doctrine of the representations of space and time: They are composed of both sensory and a priori elements. My hypothesis is that the seeming vacillation about inner sense may be a reflection of whether whether he is considering it broadly, as a faculty that provides intuitions with a particular form, or whether he is restricting what it provides to what can be sensed.