Research

Dissertation

How do we know our minds? Kant seems to leave us two unsatisfying options. We can observe ourselves, as we observe anything else, but this turns us into passive spectators on our own mental lives. Or we can be aware of ourselves as thinking, acting beings; but this awareness, Kant says, tells us nothing about the particular human being each of us actually is. I argue that Kant comes to recognize a third possibility: feeling. When we make up our minds, the act carries a felt awareness of itself, and this feeling is both active and informative: it lets us know what we are doing as we do it. On this view, human rational life is shot through with feeling, giving us an unmediated grasp, from the first-person, of our individual minds.