Kant on the Concepts of Faculties and Mind

Immanuel Kant defends a clear and distinctive tripartite structure of the faculties of the human mind from a pure philosophical standpoint on the basis of an exact distinction between reason and sensibility. Kant unfolds what other thinkers aimed at doing before or contemporaneous with him in the psychological field and the study of the faculties gains a philosophical significance as the study on the condition of possibility of the human acts of knowing, feeling, and willing for the first time in Kant's investigations. In order to understand the radical innovation of Kant's concepts of "faculty" and "mind" in the history of philosophy, in my paper I will first shed some light on the debate on the faculties during the eighteenth century. I will then complete my analysis by noting how "Vermogen" can be rightly interpreted only in connection with Kant's pure philosophical treatment of the concept of "Gemut".