Kant's theory of self-consciousness /

Powell (Guilford College) has written a critical study of the Paralogism chapter in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He devotes one chapter to each of the four fallacious arguments about the nature of the soul that are presented and refuted by Kant--thus taking up the topics of the soul as substance, as simple, as numerically identical, and as distinct from the body. The discussion is organized around previous Anglo-American interpretations of the Paralogisms, and it is especially indebted to the Kant interpretations of Wilfrid Sellars and of Jay Rosenberg (The Thinking Self, CH, Jul'87). Powell focuses on logical and semantical issues and relates Kant's account of the epistemic self to the recent literature on the first person ("I"). Powell also considers Kant's account of the self in the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories." He examines the complex relation between Kant's destruction of psychology as a metaphysical discipline, on the one hand, and Kant's own doctrine of transcendental apperception, on the other. Powell argues convincingly for the consistency of Kant's theory of the epistemic self. Although less comprehensive in scope than Karl Ameriks's earlier study of the Paralogisms (Kant's Theory of Mind; CH, Dec'82), Powell's book provides a timely alternative to Patricia Kitcher's decidedly functionalist reading of Kant's philosophical psychology (Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 1990). Recommended for advanced undergraduates and up. -G. Zoeller, University of Iowa