Zur Empirizität des „Ich denke“ in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft

The main objective of this dissertation is to clarify the meaning of Kant’s empirical statement ‘I think.’ The difficulty of interpreting this ‘I think’ statement is already well-known in previous Kant-studies. In order to do this task, I analyze and interpret a passage from B422 note in Critique of Pure Reason where it is claimed that the ‘I think’ should be an empirical statement. For interpretation of this passage I propose two different approaches to it, namely grasping from it [L1: the analytic implication of thinking activity] or [L2: the dependence of the proposition ‘I think’ on empirical representations]. The former approach ([L1]) claims that the statement ‘I think’ should be an empirical statement, because it expresses a perception of my own self. The second approach ([L2]) rather implies: only when the manifold are given to intuition, the ‘I think’ will be activated. Finally, I show that these two approaches can be reconciled in the following way: the proposition ‘I think’ can be regarded as an empirical statement in the sense that the activity ‘I think’ should always arise together with empirical representations, whereby the ‘I’ cognizes itself simultaneously in its ‘I am.’