Apperception:

The word ‘apperception’ literally means: consciousness being conscious of being consciousness ... as distinct from the normal ‘self’-conscious way of perception (‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious). Vis.:

[Dictionary Definition]: ‘apperception (n.): the mind’s perception of itself: apperceptive (adj.): of or pertaining to apperception: apperceptiveness (n.): the condition or quality of being apperceptive: ‘apperceptively’ (adv.): the experience of being apperceptive: ‘apperceptivity’: (n.): the capacity to be apperceptive’. [Fr. aperception or mod. L apperceptio(n-) (Liebniz), f. (non-productive) prefix ap- (assim. form of L ad-) + perception].

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Some examples of usage of ‘apperception’ gleaned at random from the Internet:

• Mr. David Rosenthal wrote, on August 9, 1997, that [quote]: ‘apperceptive awareness is traditionally thought of as direct ... because nothing seems intuitively to mediate between the [mental] states we are aware of and our apperceptive awareness of them. Such apperceptive awareness seems to us to be spontaneous, giving rise to the intuitive sense that it may even be intrinsic to the states apperceived. And directness of this sort implies nothing about the relevant scanning process, but only that we are unaware of any factors mediating between apperception and what is apperceived’. [endquote]. (http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/nelkin.htm).

• Mr. Immanuel Kant wrote, in ‘Critique of Pure Reason’; I; Second Part; First Division; Book One; Chapter II; Section II; Observation SS 17: [quote]: ‘the unity of apperception; [is] a faculty, therefore, which cognises nothing per se, but only connects and arranges the material of cognition, the intuition, namely, which must be presented to it by means of the object. But to show reasons for this peculiar character of our understandings, that it produces unity of apperception a priori only by means of categories, and a certain kind and number thereof, is as impossible as to explain why we are endowed with precisely so many functions of judgement and no more, or why time and space are the only forms of our intuition’. [endquote]. (www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/kant/kant039.htm).

• Mr. Philip Rudisill wrote, on October 30, 1998, [quote]: ‘transcendental apperception [is] a formal unity (the form of which is the system of categories) which precedes all recognitions of objects in order that objects might arise through the spectres and/or appearances and/or Erscheinungen such that these spectres are found to be merely images and/or effects of these objects and not things on their own’. [endquote]. (www.pvv.unit.no/~torfer/filosofisenter/lister/Kant-L/Kant-L-Oct-1998/0056.html).

• Mr. Immanuel Kant wrote, in ‘Critique of Pure Reason’; ‘Transcendental Logic’; Part II; Section 3: [quote]: ‘all necessity, without exception, is grounded in a transcendental condition ... this original and transcendental condition is no other than transcendental apperception ... to render such a transcendental presupposition valid, there must be a condition which precedes all experience, and which makes experience itself possible ... this pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception. That it deserves the name is clear from the fact that even the purest objective unity, namely, that of the a priori concepts (space and time), is only possible through relation of the intuitions to such unity of consciousness. The numerical unity of this apperception is thus the a priori ground of all concepts, just as the manifoldness of space and time is the a priori ground of the intuitions of sensibility’. [endquote]. (http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr77.html).

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