ABSTRACT
Some philosophers of mind accept that there is a hard problem of consciousness and thus an explanatory gap (Levine 1983), while others reject both claims (Dennett 1991). Among those who agree on the existence of the gap, materialists of various sorts think that the gap can be closed empirically (Block and Stalnaker 1999), while dualists claim that there is a corresponding ontological gap (Chalmers 1996). Typically, those who deny the gap attempt to show that phenomenal consciousness can be explained exhaustively in terms of some cognitive aspect of consciousness-for example, accessibility (Dehaene 2014; Cohen and Dennett 2011). What is Kant’s stance on these issues? This chapter demonstrates that the answer to this question is complicated but that Kant’s ideas can still be useful and relevant for contemporary debates, even though he was not interested in the contemporary hard problem of consciousness.
