The paper argues, against current views that see Kant as giving abstract descriptions of cognitive mechanisms (after the fashion of functionalism in cognitive science), that Kant sees mental phenomena as akin to emergent phenomena in a sense traditionally opposed to mechanism. After distinguishing several relevant notions of emergence, the paper distinguishes several of Kant’s basic emergentist theses, including his emergent materialism in chemistry and a species of mental emergence modelled on that chemical emergence. However, Kant’s doctrine of the epigenesis of pure Reason is argued to be Kant’s most fundamental emergentist thesis. The paper argues that Kant’s notion of mental emergence sheds light on some very puzzling aspects of his remarks about the unity of intuition and concept emphasized by Wilfrid Sellars. The paper sketches some of the problems in contemporary cognitive science and shows how a Sellarsian emergentism inspired by Kant addresses some of these problems and provides an interesting alternative to the kind of mechanistic positions that have tended to dominate the field. Finally, the paper locates the present emergentist reading with respect to the perspectivist reading of Kant.

The possibility of a description of the fundamental interactions of physics, including gravitation, based upon the assumption of 6 real extra dimensions is presented. The usual 4-dimension space-time, a curved surface with the Lorentz group as local symmetry, is embedded in a larger flat 10-dimension space. Through a fundamental assumption about the geometry of the orthogonal 6-d space in every point of the 4-d surface, there are two possibilities for classifying the physical states, corresponding to two types of particles: 1) hadrons, experiencing a gauge field associated to a real symmetry group GH(6), isomorphous to SU(3), which is identified with the strong interaction, and 2) leptons experiencing another gauge field associated with a real symmetry group GL(6), isomorphous to SU(2) × U(1) but different from the usual electroweak coupling. In addition, both hadrons and leptons are subject to weak and electromagnetic interactions plus a scalar BEH-like coupling, with the respective real symmetries SO(3), SO(2), SO(1), isomorphous to SU(2), U(1), I(1). This description can be extended so as to include gravitation; postulating a minimal Lagrangian in the full 10-d space, the equations of motion are derived. They imply the existence of a set of additional vector-type fields which do not act the same way upon hadrons and leptons, thus inducing a violation of the equivalence principle.