Jakub Sochacki
University of Warsaw
It seems that in the contemporary philosophy of language there are two main readings of Kant’s view on the first-person term. The first is developed by Strawson in his celebrated essay on Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) [1]. The core of his reading is the residual cartesianism diagnosis which helps to interpret the I-term as a non-empty term. The other reading, supported by M. de Gaynesford, views ‘I’ in Kant’s philosophy as a “completely empty term without any referential significance” [2].
Although I agree with the criticism of the Strawsonian view held by de Gaynesford [3], I am sceptical about reading the Kantian concept of I in semantic-theoretical context as an empty one. On the basis of Béatrice Longuenesse’s analysis of I uses in transcendental philosophy [4] I question whether one should ascribe any intent of explaining the meaning of I to Kant within the context of CPR.
For that purpose, I closely analyse the status of the I-concept in Kant’s theory of concepts. In my interpretation I find the notion of function a central one. Using Frege’s remarks on function [5] I seek to reveal an ambiguity underlying Kant’s conceptions of concepts as functions [A68/B93] and their generalisation in terms of rules, spontaneity and apperception. Neither of the two meanings inhered in this ambiguity seem to be a sensible answer to the question about the meaning of ‘I’.
I conclude with general remarks on the controversy of the status of Kant’s notion of rule in the context of formalisations of transcendental logic: should it be identified with an explicit, linguistically-formulated conditional or rather an implicit procedure for representation generation ([6], [7], [8], [9])?
References:
[1] Strawson, P.F. (1966), The Bounds of Sense. An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Methuen & Co., Ltd.
[2] de Gaynesford, M. (2006), I: the meaning of the first-person term, Oxford University Press.
[3] de Gaynesford, M. (2003), Kant and Strawson on the first person. In H.J. Glock (Ed.), Strawson and Kant, Oxford University Press.
[4] Longuenesse, B. (2017), I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again, Oxford University Press.
[5] Frege, G. (1904), ‘Was ist eine Funktion?’, in Festschrift Ludwig Boltzmann gewidmet zum sechzigsten Geburtstage, 20. Februar 1904, S. Meyer (Ed.), Leipzig: Barth, 1904, pp. 656–666; translated as ‘What is a Function?’ by P. Geach in Geach and Black (eds. and trans.) 1980, 107–116.
[6] Evans, R. (2017), Kant on constituted mental activity. APA on Philosophy and Computers.
[7] Achourioti, T., & Lambalgen, M. (2011). A formalization of Kant’s transcendental logic. The Review of Symbolic Logic. 4.
[8] Achourioti, T., & van Lambalgen, M. (2017). Kant’s logic revisited. The IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications, 4(4), 845-865.
[9] Poręba, M. (1999). Transcendentalna teoria świadomości. Aletheia
Chair: Ragna Oeynhausen
Time: September 13th, 14:00 – 14:30
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 