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The rise of modern philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 3 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 257

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MIND AND SOUL diverse’ The unity is created by the a priori activity of the understanding making a synthesis of intuitions, combining them into what Kant calls ‘the transcendental unity of apperception’ But this does not mean that I have some transcendental self-knowledge The original unity of apperception gives me only the concept of myself; for any actual self-awareness, experience is necessary Kant agrees with Descartes that the thought ‘I think’ must accompany every other possible thought Self-consciousness is inseparable from thought, because self-consciousness is necessary to think of thinking, and in advance of experience we attribute to things those properties which are the necessary conditions of our thinking of them However, Kant disagrees sharply with the conclusions that Descartes drew from his Cogito In the section of the transcendental dialectic entitled ‘The paralogisms of Pure Reason’ he makes a sustained attack upon Cartesian psychology, and indeed upon a priori and rational psychology in general Whereas empirical psychology deals with the soul as the object of inner sense, rational psychology treats of the soul as the thinking subject Rational psychology, Kant says, ‘professes to be a science built upon the single proposition I think’ It purports to be a study of an unknown X, the transcendental subject of thinking, ‘the I or he or it (the thing) that thinks’ (A, 343–5) Our natural drive to go beyond the limits of merely empirical psychology leads us into fallacies—Kant calls them ‘paralogisms’ or bogus syllogisms He lists four paralogisms of pure reason which can be crudely summarized as follows: (1) from ‘Necessarily the thinking subject is a subject’ we conclude ‘The thinking subject is a necessary subject’; (2) from ‘Dividing up the ego makes no sense’ we conclude ‘The ego is an indivisible substance; (3) from ‘Whenever I am conscious, it is the same I who am conscious’ we conclude ‘Whenever I am conscious, I am conscious of the same I’; (4) from ‘I can think of myself without my body’ we conclude ‘Without my body I can think of myself ’ In each paralogism, a harmless analytical proposition is converted, by logical sleight of hand, into a contentious synthetic a priori proposition On the basis of the paralogisms rational psychology concludes that the self is an immaterial, incorruptible, personal, immortal entity The rational proof of the immortality of the soul is nothing but delusion But that does not mean that we cannot believe in a future life 242

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