ABSTRACT
Two distinct meanings of ‘I think’ can be identified. In its first meaning, mainly found in the Transcendental Deduction, the ‘I think’ is the act of apperception; in the second meaning, found in Transcendental Deduction and in the section of Paralogisms in particular, I think (in italics in these pages) is assumed in its representational nature. Three key issues emerge from the discussion of ‘I think’: (1) a semantic problem connected to the type of reference of the representation ‘I’, (2) an epistemic problem regarding the type of knowledge relative to the thinking subject produced by the representation ‘I think’, and (3) a strictly metaphysical problem associated with the features assigned to the thinking subject’s nature. In this chapter, it is shown that (1) in line with the Formal Ownership Reading, the identity or unity of self-consciousness does not presuppose the identity of a real subject but a formal identity based on the representation I think, (2) Kant establishes general, metaphysical characterisations concerning the nature of the thinking subject: the thinking as spontaneity is the being itself, and (3) to some extent, such characterisations are captured by the concept of the ‘transcendental subject’ through the simple representation I.
