Kant's Transcendental Deduction by Alison Laywine (review)

Abstract

precedes or perhaps accompanies my rummaging for food. Epiphenomenalism is not an attractive position, and it would seem to wreak havoc with Kant’s moral psychology, but Jauernig may be right about his commitment to it. After laying out her interpretations of core Kantian doctrines and Kant’s arguments for them in the first four chapters, Jauernig turns in the last two chapters to perennially difficult questions about how things in themselves can ground appearances and how things in themselves can be known to exist. I consider just one of these tricky issues, the relation between transcendental and empirical selves. Jauernig observes, “It seems pretty clear that Kant is committed to a one-to-one mapping between empirical selves and the transcendental selves that ground them” (276). Kant’s seeming identification by fiat of the empirical self with the real, moral, transcendental self was one of Strawson’s prime reasons for dismissing his metaphysics. Jauernig does not try to defend transcendental idealism against this or other trenchant objections, but only to be as faithful to the texts and the historical context as she can in interpreting it. P a t r i c i a K i t c h e r Columbia University