ABSTRACT
In eighteenth-century Germany, Hume’s conception of the mind as a bundle of causally interacting mental episodes provoked a fierce dispute over the status of the human being and its place in nature. This chapter looks at Kant, Herder, and Tetens to show that, in this debate, questions about the unique status of the human being as a rational creature became a pressing issue and that the attempt to answer them by providing a naturalized theory of the human mind that conceives of experience as a crucially formative factor in the emergence of reason backfired.
