Abstract for the Kant in Asia International Conference

at Hong Kong Baptist University

20-23 May 2009

Byron Kaldis, “'Medius Terminus': Personhood between Subjectivity and Naturalism”

Kant positions the human being as “cosmotheoros” between the Ideas of God and the World. The human being as ‘person' exhibits this duality synthesizing the two prima facie antithetical Ideas within moral consciousness.

Classically the person is an ineliminable subject of self-consciousness, but naturalized epistemology jeopardizes a transcendental justification of the a priori conditions of knowledge.

Proposals for the self as ‘systematically elusive” require a pre-linguistic ability to engage in error-free self-referentiality. Treating the subject of conscious experience on the basis of neuroscience resists the plausibility of non-propositional self-knowledge. All knowledge being propositional while some of it ineffable parallels Kant's contrast above.

Self-consciousness may stir a middle course between naturalism (Kant's “World”) and the ineffable (Kant's “God”). Instead of morality, the concept of personhood can play the mediating role provided its defining characteristic of self-consciousness involves knowledge that is neither given in terms of neurobiology nor by resorting to ineffability.

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