Abstract: For both Descartes and Kant, thinking is, as we might put it, essentially self-conscious. In thinking p, one is-at least implicitly-self-conscious of thinking p, which one might express by saying 'I think p'. Moreover, for Kant no less than for Descartes, this point about the self-conscious character of thinking plays a central role in philosophical reflection on our capacity for knowledge.

But despite these generic points of agreement, Kant and Descartes diverge over how, in detail, to understand the significance of the cogito (the 'I think'). Descartes thought that reflection on the cogito entitles us to draw substantive metaphysical conclusions about the nature of the thinking subject: in short, that it is an immaterial thinking thing. In the Paralogisms section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that this is a mistake.

Kant's criticism of Descartes (a 'rational psychologist' if ever there was one) in the Paralogisms turns crucially on the claim that the 'I think' is 'merely formal': that through it one is not conscious of any object. But just what does Kant mean by this? And what are the implications of this claim for an understanding of the self-consciousness of thinking we all enjoy throughout our ordinary lives in thinking about the world around us?

According to Strawson's reading of Kant in The Bounds of Sense, the formality thesis is not a claim about the 'I think' simpliciter, but about the 'I think' only as it is considered from a certain philosophical perspective in which we have abstracted from the links between 'I' and (what he calls) 'empirical criteria of subject-identity'. So understood, Kant's thesis does not entail that our ordinary self-consciousness of thinking is 'merely formal'. His point, Strawson urges, is only that, when we reflect upon this self-consciousness under a certain abstraction, we do so at the cost of having any object in view, at all; and that, accordingly, our reflections, carried out under such an abstraction, can yield no substantive knowledge of the nature of the thinking subject.

In this paper I develop and defend an alternative reading of Kant's formality thesis, and of the criticism of Descartes it serves to underwrite. Against Strawson, I argue that Kant's point is indeed about the 'I think' simpliciter, and, as such, is meant to have implications for the self-consciousness of thinking we enjoy in our ordinary lives. When, in the course of my day, I think e.g. 'That cat is hungry', my self-consciousness of thinking this, which I might express by saying 'I think that cat is hungry', is not, as Strawson and Strawson's Kant would have it, a thought about another object-supposedly: the particular person I am-to the effect that it thinks the cat is hungry. Kant's thesis, properly understood, is no friendlier to that thought than it is to the claim that the 'I think' is a consciousness of an immaterial thinking thing.