ABSTRACT
There needs to be a first principle that both demarcates a priori psychologism from everything else and systematically integrates its components, or it would be little better than random groping. The principle Kant identified as the only possible basis for a priori psychologism is the Cartesian ‘I think.’ The chapter traces the career of this notion from the point in the Second of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy where Kant’s views coincide with Descartes’s to the precise point they diverge. The focus of the latter is Kant’s determination that the certainty expressed by cogito ergo sum has neither metaphysical nor epistemological but solely logical significance. The conditions that make the logical self-consciousness ‘I think’ possible as well as the representations made possible by it thus constitute the subject matter of his a priori psychologism. Subjects discussed include Descartes’s wax example, imagination, understanding, language, self-consciousness, metaphysics, dualism, God, the Turing test, and psychology.
