ABSTRACT

Kant's tendency to employ the language of psychology is much more pronounced in the original version of the Transcendental Deduction. It plains enough that Kant's theory of self-consciousness has little or no plausibility, so long as we take him to be discussing the question how objects are perceived by human minds. On the other hand, we find once again that his point of view becomes much more acceptable, if he may be supposed to be concerned with bringing out the essential nature of perceptual judgments. In order that there should be such a thing as judgment, the mind must exercise a certain intellectual activity which expresses itself in the fact that a multiplicity of sense-presentations are thought of as belonging together and constituting a unity. Kant has many different names for the fundamental act of the human intelligence. Other expressions he uses include pure apperception, original apperception, transcendental unity of self-consciousness.