Kant’s mind and its matter

Abstract

Mind and body interaction has been a problem of philosophy and science for years. It is puzzling how the mind, which is something immaterial, finds a way to express itself in the material body. The subject of experience has both a material body and mind, which provides him with feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc. Kant distinguishes between two aspects of this self: the phenomenal and the noumenal. The phenomenal self is the seat of mental phenomena while the noumenal self is the unknowable aspect of the self. Although different thinkers have speculated that various bodily organs such as the heart might be associated with the mind, it was later thought that the organ where it resided must be the brain. Interestingly, Kant’s account of the phenomenal self has some relationship to such a view of the mental. His account of the mind in the Critique of Pure Reason does not explicitly state anything about the matter of the phenomenal self, yet some aspects of the account in question taken together with some passages from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View suggest that Kant’s account places the mind ‘within’ the brain. Moreover, this situation makes Kant’s account of the phenomenal self compatible with physicalism. The brain has been the subject of a great deal of research. New fields of study such as neuropsychology and cognitive science have opened a way of exploring the brain. Other fields of study such as biology and psychology also have studied the structure, functions, etc. of the brain. In this thesis I make use of the findings of some of those studies related to brain imaging and brain lesions. The reason why I use those studies is to strengthen the idea that mental phenomena are linked with physical ones. They emphasize the relationship between the mind and the brain by scientific findings such as recording brain activity or observing changes in one’s mental functioning after a lesion in the brain. Those studies are used to show the need of investigating the brain to explain the phenomenal self. Moreover, Kant’s position as compatible with physicalism is also compatible with the findings of those studies.