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The most significant response to Hume was that of Kant. In his Transcendental Deductions Kant dealt explicitly with some themes that are highly pertinent to the topic of the unity of the mind. However, a thorough examination of the Critique of Pure Reason as a response to Hume's doubts requires at least a book in itself, and the task has elicited many such books. The Transcendental Deduction in particular is a notorious quagmire. Rather than embark on the ambitious project of Kantian exegesis and reconstruction I will consider one distinguished commentator's attempt to clarify the Transcendental Deduction and get a clear line of argument from it. This is P.F. Strawson's account in The Bounds of Sense.¹ On the basis of Strawson's interpretation I argue that my response to Hume has been a naturalised version of Kant's. In the previous chapter I argued that the stream of consciousness cried out to be explained in terms of unconscious mechanisms. In this chapter I say something about some of the most important of these underlying mechanisms. Where Kant talks of the transcendental I speak of the brain. I see Kant as having outlined some of the most important tasks undertaken by the brain in supporting our conscious awareness. These Kantian insights have been refined by recent commentators, such as Strawson and Gareth Evans. This enterprise has done much to illumine what I have called the unity of self-reflexiveness. I will argue that the unity of self-reflexiveness is one of the things that Kant was concerned with, and that the mechanisms underlying it can be identified with a reflexive locus of action distinct from the world. This locus of action could be deemed to be the self.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-23178-2_5

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