Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self

Even though Kant himself held that his view of the mind and consciousness were inessential to his main purpose, some of his ideas came to have an enormous influence on his successors. Ideas central to his view are now central to cognitive science. Other ideas equally central to his point of view had almost no influence on subsequent work, however. In this article, first we survey Kant's model as a whole and the claims that have been influential. Then we examine his claims about consciousness of self specifically. Many of his ideas about the consciousness of self and related issues have not been influential. Indeed, even though he achieved remarkable insights into consciousness of self, they next appeared only 200 years later, in the 1960s and 1970s. [Read more] ...