The Self-Conscious, Thinking Subject A Kantian Contribution to Reestablishing Reason in a Post-Truth Age

This book argues that the primary function of human thinking in language is to make judgments, which are logical-normative connections of concepts. Robert Abele points out that this presupposes cognitive conditions that cannot be accounted for by empirical-linguistic analyses of language content or social conditions alone. Judgments rather assume both reason and a unified subject, and this requires recognition of a Kantian-type of transcendental dimension to them. Judgments are related to perception in that both are syntheses, defined as the unity of representations according to a rule/form. Perceptual syntheses are simultaneously pre-linguistic and proto-rational, and the understanding (Kant’s Verstand) makes these syntheses conceptually and thus self-consciously explicit.  Abele concludes with a transcendental critique of postmodernism and what its deflationary view of ontological categories—such as the unified and reasoning subject—has done to political thinking. He presents an alternative that calls for a return to normativity and a recognition of reason, objectivity, and the universality of principles.

1. The Primacy of Judgment.- 2. Judgment.- 3: Synthesis: The Common Form of Judgment and Perception.- 4. Synthesis and the Forms of Judgment in Perception.- 5. The Unity of Cognition in the Synthetic Unity of Apperception.- 6. The Drawbacks of Empirical Metaphoric Reductionism.- 7. The Politics of Negative Ontology: Postmodernism.

Robert Abele is Professor of Philosophy at Diablo Valley College, USA. He is the author of A User's Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice (2012).