Béatrice Longuenesse - Böcker

As a prominent figure of the 18th century Enlightenment, Kant advocated faith in reason and in the possibility of human progress through the development of human beings' rational capacities. In contrast, as the founder of 20th century psychoanalysis, Freud revealed that rationality itself is rooted in the non-rational soil of mental life. For Freud, rational thinking is pervaded with irrational motivations for thinking and acting. For Kant, the capacity to affirm and endorse on rational grounds one's beliefs and actions is the highest capacity in human beings, one that raises them above all other living beings. Those contrasts between the two thinkers have led to countless philosophical manifestos pitting Freud and Kant against each other. Some accuse Kant of having played a central role in the promotion of the hubris of modern rationality, which resulted in the domination and destruction of nature. Others accuse Freud of being a prime culprit in the attacks against reason, progress and the very possibility of a better future for humanity. In The Organization of the Mind, Béatrice Longuenesse paints a more nuanced picture. She arguesthat Kant's analysis of our mental capacities reveals deep-seated and irresolvable conflicts within the mind--an insight that brings him closer to Freud than is often recognized. At the same time, Freud's concept of “the unconscious” is as original and revolutionary as Freud claimed. Freud developed that concept in connection to aspects of the mind that earlier philosophers had touched upon but never fully explored: the organization of memory traces and the way they are shaped by emotions and affects. The dynamic interplay of memory, emotion, and affect significantly influences rational thinking itself. Freud's articulation of these connections gives his theory of the unconscious its distinctive power. The Organization of the Mind, based on the author's Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures she gave a year later at Oxford University, creates space for a dialogue between Kant's and Freud's first-personperspectives onthe mind, on the one hand;and, on the other, the third-person approaches of affective and cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the study of memory. These convergences offer fresh directions for contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology.

Béatrice Longuenesse presents an original exploration of our understanding of ourselves and the way we talk about ourselves. In the first part of the book she discusses contemporary analyses of our use of 'I' in language and thought, and compares them to Kant's account of self-consciousness, especially the type of self-consciousness expressed in the proposition 'I think.' According to many contemporary philosophers, necessarily, any instance of our use of 'I' is backed by our consciousness of our own body. For Kant, in contrast, 'I think' just expresses our consciousness of being engaged in bringing rational unity into the contents of our mental states. In the second part of the book, Longuenesse analyzes the details of Kant's view and argues that contemporary discussions in philosophy and psychology stand to benefit from Kant's insights into self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness. The third and final part of the book outlines similarities between Kant's view of the structure of mental life grounding our uses of 'I' in 'I think' and in the moral 'I ought to,' on the one hand; and Freud's analysis of the organizations of mental processes he calls 'ego' and 'superego' on the other hand. Longuenesse argues that Freudian metapsychology offers a path to a naturalization of Kant's transcendental view of the mind. It offers a developmental account of the normative capacities that ground our uses of 'I,' which Kant thought could not be accounted for without appealing to a world of pure intelligences, distinct from the empirical, natural world of physical entities.

What do we express when we use the first-person pronoun 'I' in phrases such as 'I think' or 'I ought to'? Do we refer to ourselves as biologically unique, socially determined individuals? Or do we express a consciousness of ourselves as the bearers of thoughts we share, or can share, with all other human beings whatever their particular biological, social, or cultural background?Every year the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam invites a prominent philosopher to occupy the Spinoza Chair and give two public lectures on a topic in philosophy. Beatrice Longuenesse, in these lectures, explores the contrast and complementarity between these two aspects of the use of 'I'. Her first lecture considers the first-person pronoun in relation to the exercise of our mental capacities in abstract reasoning, and in relation to our knowledge of objective facts about the world. Her second lecture explores the use of 'I' in relation to what we take to be our moral obligations. In bringing together these two fascinating lectures, this book presents contrasting aspects of the self as radically individual on the one hand, and as the bearer of universally shared capacities on the other.

Béatrice Longuenesse presents an original exploration of our understanding of ourselves and the way we talk about ourselves. In the first part of the book she discusses contemporary analyses of our use of 'I' in language and thought, and compares them to Kant's account of self-consciousness, especially the type of self-consciousness expressed in the proposition 'I think.' According to many contemporary philosophers, necessarily, any instance of our use of 'I' is backed by our consciousness of our own body. For Kant, in contrast, 'I think' just expresses our consciousness of being engaged in bringing rational unity into the contents of our mental states. In the second part of the book, Longuenesse analyzes the details of Kant's view and argues that contemporary discussions in philosophy and psychology stand to benefit from Kant's insights into self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness. The third and final part of the book outlines similarities between Kant's view of the structure of mental life grounding our uses of 'I' in 'I think' and in the moral 'I ought to,' on the one hand; and Freud's analysis of the organizations of mental processes he calls 'ego' and 'superego' on the other hand. Longuenesse argues that Freudian metapsychology offers a path to a naturalization of Kant's transcendental view of the mind. It offers a developmental account of the normative capacities that ground our uses of 'I,' which Kant thought could not be accounted for without appealing to a world of pure intelligences, distinct from the empirical, natural world of physical entities.

Kant claims to have established his table of categories or "pure concepts of the understanding" according to the "guiding thread" provided by logical forms of judgment. By drawing extensively on Kant's logical writings, Beatrice Longuenesse analyzes this controversial claim, and then follows the thread through its continuation in the transcendental deduction of the categories, the transcendental schemata, and the principles of pure understanding. The result is a systematic, persuasive new interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. Longuenesse shows that although Kant adopts his inventory of the forms of judgment from logic textbooks of his time, he is nevertheless original in selecting just those forms he holds to be indispensable to our ability to relate representations to objects. Kant gives formal representation to this relation between conceptual thought and its objects by introducing the term "x" into his analysis of logical forms to stand for the object that is "thought under" the concepts that are combined in judgment.This "x" plays no role in Kant's forms of logical inference, but instead plays a role in clarifying the relation between logical forms (forms of concept subordination) and combinations ("syntheses") of perceptual data, necessary for empirical cognition. Considering Kant's logical forms of judgment thus helps illuminate crucial aspects of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole, while revealing the systematic unity between Kant's theory of judgment in the first Critique and his analysis of "merely reflective" (aesthetic and teleological) judgments in the third Critique.