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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

The Role of the "Subject's Power" in Kant's Account of Desire

Feldblyum, Leonard 15 December 2017 (has links)
Understanding Kant’s account of desire is vital to the project of evaluating his views about moral psychology, as well as his account of freedom qua autonomy. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant claims that “Desire (appetitio) is the self-determination of a subject's power through the representation of something in the future as an effect of this representation” (7:251). My goal is to clarify which of the subject’s specific capacities Kant means by the “subject's power,” and what role this capacity plays in desire. I argue that the subject's power cannot be her capacity to act. Rather, the subject's power is best understood as her capacity to generate the psychological states that cause action. I call these motivational states 'activation signals'. Desire consists in the self-determination of the subject’s capacity to generate activation signals by her representation of the object of desire together with an accompanying incentive.

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