Abstract

Quassim Cassam closes Self and World by quoting Kant’s claim that Descartes was mistaken in thinking that self-consciousness reveals us to ourselves as immaterial objects. He does this to set the stage for his own conclusion, that Kant was himself equally mistaken in thinking that self-consciousness does not reveal us to ourselves as objects at all. Instead, according to Cassam, “self-consciousness... is intimately bound up with awareness of the subject as an object,... as a physical object in a world of physical objects.” It is no accident that Cassam juxtaposes his own conclusion in this way alongside Kant’s discussion of the self, for the whole book is a critical meditation on Kant’s conception of the self. Furthermore, as Cassam is well aware, the thesis he examines and rejects, that the thinker cannot coherently conceive of itself as an object in the world of which it takes itself to have experience, is central both to Kant’s transcendental idealism and to the thought of his many successors. So Cassam’s critical argument goes to the heart of a whole tradition of philosophy.