Self-knowledge and the problem of existence

In his book Kant and the Problem of Self-Knowledge (New York, Abingdon: Routledge 2019, 214 pages) Luca Forgione argues that the semantic, epistemic and metaphysical analysis of Kant’s theory of self-knowledge is possible within the frame of a merely formal understanding of ‘I’. Although the author shows that for Kant self-knowledge is in fact knowledge of a formal thinking subject, there remains the difficulty that the formal analysis of self-knowledge entails the existence claim about the transcendental apperception. This claim is incompatible, I argue, with Kant’s theory of the analytic and synthetic unity of apperception.