In this dissertation, I argue for what I call a formalist interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental apperception. On this interpretation, transcendental apperception is not a representation of the subject, or any aspect of a subject, such as her internal activities or states. Indeed, I maintain that transcendental apperception should not be understood in representational terms at all. Instead, I argue, transcendental apperception must be conceived of as an end-directed activity of a subject that is the formal condition of a particular kind of representation, thought. On the view I develop, Kant identifies transcendental apperception with a spontaneous activity of the subject, which functions as an inner organizational principle through which representations are combined in such a way that they have a particular kind of unity, a unity that Kant calls ‘formal’ or ‘logical’. It is this kind of unity that a representation must have in order to inhere in a subject not just as a sensible representation, but as an intellectual representation, which, for finite beings like us, are thoughts. In developing this account, I draw on Kant’s faculty psychology and the underlying metaphysics of causal powers that he inherits from the rationalist tradition, to show that his conception of the understanding as a spontaneous faculty signals that he conceives of its operations in teleological terms. This teleological dimension of the understanding helps us to articulate an account of transcendental apperception that breaks from the two dominant approaches in the literature, what I will call the epistemic and psychological approaches. On the epistemic reading, transcendental apperception is a kind of self-consciousness that grounds our cognitive agency, and on the psychological reading, transcendental apperception is a mechanism that functions causally to connect representations to produce judgments. The former account, I argue, is flawed insofar as it introduces normative and epistemic considerations into Kant’s account of the understanding that are incompatible with key aspects of his faculty psychology; and the latter is flawed because it fails to situate the understanding within the teleological explanatory framework signaled by Kant’s claim that the understanding is spontaneous.

Human reason demands not merely cognition that, but cognition why—it demands to cognize things from their grounds. In both rationalism’s heyday in the seventeenth century and its contemporary renaissance, rationalist philosophers (like Spinoza and Leibniz) purported to satisfy reason’s demand through the principle of sufficient reason and other metaphysical principles. Yet the eighteenth-century German rationalist tradition faces a foundational crisis concerning the very intelligibility of grounds: under what conditions can reason cognize something from its ground? I first argue that (i) this question tears apart Leibniz’s German rationalist successors—including Christian Wolff and Christian Crusius—and (ii) the early Kant’s discernment of inadequacies in their answers helps to awaken him from dogmatic slumber. And against the longstanding trend of taking the Critique of Pure Reason’s account of experience as its cornerstone (by P.F. Strawson and many others), I then propose that its titular project revolves around saving the possibility of rational cognition. On this basis, I offer novel reconstructions of Kant’s radical arguments for idealism and the restriction of rational cognition to the bounds of sense. In short: to be saved, rational cognition must be restrained.

The study of Hegel has recently undergone a renaissance within contemporary analytic philosophy. For a range of thinkers (including Brandom, Pinkard, Pippin and McDowell), Hegel can be seen as offering a creative and powerful account of fundamental topics in the analytic tradition such as consciousness, justification, and semantic content. The dominant paradigm used to justify this return to Hegel has been to interpret his project in The Phenomenology of Spirit as an anticipation of Sellars' critique of the myth of the given.

In my dissertation I argue that the new wave of interpreters are right to note that Hegel is concerned with questions central to the analytic tradition, but are wrong to motivate the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s work by appealing to its rejection of givenness. For I contend that Hegel actually accepts sophisticated versions of three forms of givenness: phenomenal, epistemological, and semantic. This can be seen by adopting a more phenomenological approach to Hegel’s texts—an approach which takes seriously Hegel’s claim that The Phenomenology of Spirit is a self-examination of consciousness. Through this approach I show how an interpretation can be constructed which is not only more faithful to the textual evidence but also credits Hegel with what I argue is an ultimately more satisfying philosophical account of key issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind.