Kant and the Self 59

have more than punctual, uncollected, "merely empirical" apperception.

Nonetheless, just as we may still have some representations without even
empirical apperception, it can also seem that, even if we have some thoughts
that are also parts of thoughts like (T), we still could also have some other
("first-level") thoughts without any possible thought of those thoughts, let
alone a collective "transcendental" thought (a set of thoughts like [T]) that
connects the whole set of such ("first-level," i.e., "[E]-level") thoughts. To
deny that this could happen is to hold for us what I will call "the Strong Apper-
ception Thesis" (SAT), that is, the thesis that all one's empirical apperception
requires transcendental apperception.
It may seem that very little depends on such an esoteric thesis, and yet
one way of looking at the main stream of continentally inspired recent work on
Kantian apperception is to see it as focusing on precisely this point, as building
on SAT and as contending that an insistence on this kind of possible self-con-
sciousness for all our consciousness is the very cornerstone of Kant's philoso-
phy.
I will be focusing on three closely related sets of substantive claims that
recent interpreters have attempted to connect with SAT.
Within the first of these sets is a thesis that I will call "Henrich Claim I."
This is the claim that SAT is used by Kant to ground a Cartesian a priori grasp
of our continuing personal identity, which grasp is in turn held to be essential to
an a priori proof of the objectivity of our representations. What I will call
"Henrich Claim II" is the compound thesis that Kant's understanding of SAT is
accompanied by an account of self-consciousness that Henrich calls the
"Reflexion Theory," that (whatever its value may be for Claim I) this is a fun-
damentally inadequate theory, and that it has to be replaced by an account
inspired by what Henrich calls "Fichte' s original insight." I and others have
argued against Henrich Claim I; 14 so here the focus will be on difficulties in
Henrich Claim II.
A second group of arguments is contained in a critical response to Hen-
rich's Claim II by Dieter Sturma.
15
For the most part I will endorse Sturma's
points, and use them to defend an account of self-consciousness that I ta.ke to be
fairly close to an orthodox reading of Kant's doctrine of apperception.
I will then use these results in criticizing a third and most recent discus-
sion of apperception, namely Frederick Neuhouser's quasi-Henrichian argu-
ments that Kant supposedly failed to see how the notions involved in SAT
should lead us to follow Fichte in reconceiving the theoretical subject as a
"self-positing" being.
The evaluation of SAT itself clearly hinges on how one understands the
"possibility" that it denies. Understood as restricted to humans, SAT insists on
the claim that any "I think that x" episodes that we have must be able to be con-
nected with other such episodes in the transcendental way that was discussed