There Is No Self-Consciousness Without Inner Sense in Kant

Tobias Rosefeldt (Humboldt University, Berlin)

The lecture will take place online (via Webex) on Wednesday, 28 May 2025, from 18:00 – 19:30 CET. The lecture will be held in English.

Please see below for the Webex-link and an abstract of the lecture. 

The talk is part of the lecture series Digital Kant-Lectures, organized by Digital Kant-Centre NRW, which takes place on the last Wednesday of each month via Webex. For the program of the series, please see here: https://kant-zentrum-nrw.de/digital-kant-lectures/.

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Webex-Link: 

https://uni-siegen.webex.com/uni-siegen/j.php?MTID=mbda511d44a2be041e4272ee23f14649e

Abstract: 

In my talk, I will argue that Kantian transcendental apperception and Kantian inner sense are only weakly, and not strongly independent from one another. They are two irreducible human faculties that provide two irreducible kinds of content. But they cannot operate independently from one another. In particular, there are no cases of actual self-consciousness, even not those of an awareness of our spontaneous thinking activity, that are only based on the first faculty and do not involve inner sense. 

My argument will be based in the following three premises, which I will defend on textual and philosophical grounds: 

(P1)   When Kant speaks about self-consciousness, he always means the awareness that we have of our mental activities or states as our own.

(P2)   For Kant, any awareness of our mental activities or states as our own implies an awareness of our own existence.

(P3)   For Kant, any awareness of the existence of something implies intuition, which in the case of the awareness of our own existence must include intuition through inner sense. 

I will then offer a model of Kantian inner sense that makes the claim that even the awareness of our own spontaneous thinking involves inner sense less outrageous than it might sound.