J.B. Merians Auffassung der Apperzeption. Eine Quelle für Kant?

In a pioneering text, Udo Thiel has claimed that, among the conceptions of apperception that were held by Kant's contemporaries, it is Johann Bernhard Merian's which comes closest to Kant's own theory of apperception (Thiel 1996). I argue that Thiel's claim must be strongly nuanced because of two important differences between Merian's and Kant's conception of apperception. First, Merian's dismissal of obscure representations against Kant's explicit recognition of them as a fundamental part of his doctrine; Second, I show that the Kantian distinction between apprehensive and reflexive apperception must be understood as a further development of Leibniz' distinction between perception and apperception. As a consequence, for Kant the awareness of one's existence that Merian claims to be clearly implied in both the apperception of oneself and of other things can be no more than an undetermined, and therefore necessarily obscure, perception.