Material and Supervision Costs Grant Research Fellowship 2022/23 DAAD Marharyta Rouba

The concept of the 'transcendental subject' in Kant's philosophy: a systematic and historical investigation
The concept of the ‘transcendental subject’ is one of the most problematic concepts in Kant’s philosophy. On the one hand, taking into account the ‘Copernican revolution’ conducted by Kant, this concept being composed of the concepts ‘transcendental’ and ‘subject’ may lay claim to designating the key agent of the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e., the subject of transcendental philosophy that provides the conditions of possibility of experience. On the other hand, Kant uses the concept ‘transcendental subject’ extremely rarely, and that would look like an imbalance regarding its role if the ‘transcendental subject’ were really used by Kant for designating the subject of the transcendental philosophy, i.e., in an epistemological and formal sense. In my dissertation, I propose an ontological and realistic interpretation, in which the transcendental subject is counted as something real in us but not as a repository of a priori forms and not as a mental object, the possibility of which is merely logical. In the situation of Kant’s refusal to hypostatize a thinking being, the transcendental subject interpreted as the ‘real’ in the transcendental philosophy gives a possibility to avoid reducing the appearances of inner sense to illusions, and thoughts about the self – to thoughts about the empty concept, behind which there is no actual object.
Since the subject matter of this dissertation is the non-empirical object, which is positioned outside of empirical knowledge, a criterion for correctness of the proposed interpretation is the coherence of judgements formulated about the transcendental subject in Kant’s philosophy. The research is terminological and is based on detailed textual work with Kant’s works, drafts, and lectures, with particular emphasis on the cases of Kant’s own use of the concept ‘transcendental subject’ in the pre-critical and critical periods. Regarding the critical period, I reveal three basic features of the transcendental subject and follow them: (1) it is the substantial but not the substance; (2) it is unknowable although it is connected with a ‘feeling of an existence’; (3) and it is analogous to the transcendental object on the side of subjectivity. An analysis is also made of those concepts and distinctions of metaphysics in the late 17th and 18th centuries that could play a role in the genesis of Kant’s concept of ‘transcendental subject’, and it is considered how the transcendental subject was understood in the early receptions of the Critique of Pure Reason in the late 18th century.