Abstract

A central aim of the contemporary reductive scientistic project is the task, inherited from the French Enlightenment, of producing a machine model of man. Cognitive science is the attempt at that most difficult part of this project, namely, to do for mind what Newton had already allegedly done for corporeal nature. Kant has recently been claimed as a precursor of this French project. The most detailed picture of a cognitive-scientistic Kant is defended by Kitcher. Contra Strawson, she claims that in his transcendental psychology Kant is “offering hypotheses about the mechanisms that carry out [cognitive] tasks.”