Kant’s Functionalist Cognitive Psychology in Context
from Part II - Philosophy of Subjective Spirit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2019
Kant’s Critical theory of cognitive judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason is deeply functionalist: it identifies a host of integrated cognitive functions which must be exercised by any being which or who integrates sensory information over time through space using twelve basic forms of judgment. Most of these cognitive capacities and functioning Kant ascribes to the sub-personal transcendental power of imagination, “a blind but indispensable function of the soul” (Seele; CPR A78/B103); only apperceptive functions of cognitive judgment – explicit judgings and judgments – are effected by understanding and reason (cf. CPR A79/B105–6, B152, 162 n.). Kant’s transcendental idealism largely precludes investigating how our natural psychophysiology does or can enable our exercise of these a priori conditions necessary for experience and knowledge. For sound reasons, Hegel rejects Kant’s transcendental idealism, and thus poses the question, How can our natural psychophysiology enable our exercise of these a priori conditions necessary for our apperception, experience, and knowledge? This chapter examines Hegel’s developments of Kant’s cognitive psychology in his treatment of “Theoretical Spirit,” the first part of his “Psychology,” following upon his “Anthropology” and (encyclopedic) “Phenomenology of Spirit,” and followed by “Practical Spirit,” which concludes this first part of Hegel’s encyclopedic Philosophy of Spirit, “Subjective Spirit,” thus preparing his subsequent accounts of “objective” (social) and of “absolute” spirit.
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