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Patricia Kitcher. Kant's Thinker. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 312. Cloth, $74.00.
Kant's Thinker is an excellent and important addition to the literature. In it, Patricia Kitcher aims at arriving at a comprehensive understanding of Kant's theory of the cognitive subject. To this end, she analyzes a central component of the most notoriously difficult part of the Critique of Pure Reason, the theory of the unity of apperception in the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. In Kitcher's view, the ultimate payoff of such a study is that Kant's theory can "provide a 'new' source of illumination for current attempts to understand the nature of cognition and the mind" (3). This may be so. But the main value of the book will likely be for Kant scholars, who will appreciate the depth and sophistication of her interpretation.
The book is divided into three parts-background, theory, and evaluation-and fifteen chapters. After a brief overview chapter, Kitcher devotes five chapters to the history of the problem of the cognitive subject that is essential to understanding Kant's problems and concerns in the Critique of Pure Reason. The chapters concern Locke's theory of inner sense (ch. 2), theories of personal identity in Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Tetens (ch. 3), rationalist metaphysics...