Nonpositional Consciousness and the Form of Thinking: Kant and Boyle on Self-Consciousness
Canadian Journal of Philosophy April 1, 2025 Claudi Brink
A philosophical paper examines Matthew Boyle's account of prereflective self-awareness from his book Transparency and Reflection, which links self-consciousness to rationality through a Sartrean lens rather than standard Kantian interpretations. The author argues that Boyle's framework offers tools for reinterpreting Kant's claim that the "I think" must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. However, the author contends that Boyle's model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant's own account, understood as a kind of prereflective consciousness, has resources to address this challenge.