Abstract

This paper discusses how Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer and Mou Zongsan offer different accounts of “transcendental apperception” and how their accounts lead to different notions of boundary of human experience. Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception is the function of the understanding that synthesizes representations with a priori concepts. He holds that the interconnection of the sensitivity and the understanding is the boundary of human experience. Guyer explains how to understand “transcendental apperception” as a form of empirical knowledge of the self. He claims that Kant’s theory of time-determination will suffice to describe conditions which experience must meet if we are to be capable of determinate self-consciousness. Mou suggests that transcendental apperception is a principle of the understanding, in particular, to synthesize representations into cognitiveobjects. Mou claims that we have intellectual intuition, which allows us the possibility to go beyond the phenomenon and to access the noumenon.