Abstract

Waxman has reversed the historical process and gone from Kant to Hume. In his previous book on Kant, Kant's Model of the Mind, it was pointed out that Hume's philosophy seemed to come to grief with the failure to account for the identity of the self, and this in turn was a consequence of Hume's inability to account for how the imagination is able to yield a consciousness of succession. There seemed no way to obtain either the unity, spatial and temporal, in the objects perceived, or the unity of apperception in the perceiver. The problem of knowledge for Kant in many ways becomes simply the problem of how, from a manifold of entities spread out spatially and occurring in a temporally developing intuition, the mind is able to achieve the unity of apperception which, as Plotinus, Bayle, Leibniz, and perhaps even Hume when he recognized his failure to account for the unity of the self, all argued is essential to all thought. In trying to come to grips with this, Kant arrived at a transcendental idealism in which neither space nor time nor even sensations as ordinarily understood had any ground in the reality that transcends the only phenomenal empirical world. If Hume's failure led in Kant to a sort of empirical realism, it also led to the radical scepticism of the transcendental idealism.