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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:scholarworks.gsu.edu:philosophy_theses-1228 |
| Date | 15 December 2017 |
| Creators | Feldblyum, Leonard |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University |
| Source Sets | Georgia State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Philosophy Theses |
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