By Katharina T. Kraus
Abstract:This chapter offers an account of Kant’s transcendental philosophy specifically in relation to psychology (as well as tangentially to logic) and discuss the kind of idealism it entails as distinct from a psychological idealism. In Section 1, I introduce Kant’s transcendental philosophy as a philosophy of form, especially of the form of cognition, and draw a distinction between transcendental philosophy as the formal study of the mind and psychology as the material study of the mind. In Section 2, after briefly reviewing the array of recent interpretations of transcendental idealism, I develop in outline an interpretation of transcendental idealism as formal idealism and show how it differs from any sort of psychological or material idealism (e.g., Berkeleyan idealism). I conclude with some final remarks on the constructive potential of Kant’s transcendental philosophy in offering a metaphysical foundation to psychology as a science and on how Kant’s transcendental idealism has shaped subsequent debates in philosophy and especially the dispute between psychologism and anti-psychologism.