Event Timeslots (1)
Wednesday
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What is self-consciousness, and in what ways does it relate to our use, in language and in thought, of the first person pronoun ‘I’? This question, first raised by Kant in his first Critique, is at the core of Béatrice Longuenesse’s last book I, Me and Mine: Back to Kant and Back Again (OUP, 2017). In this ambitious work, Longuenesse explores recent developments in the philosophy of self-consciousness, starting from Wittgenstein’s famous distinction between ‘I’ as an object and ‘I’ as a subject, which has largely dominated analytical philosophy in the last decades, to Gareth Evans’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s accounts of bodily self-consciousness. Longuenesse argues for a reassessment of Kant’s distinction between consciousness of one’s own body and consciousness of mental unity, i.e. a specific organization of mental events. Focusing on the latter, Longuenesse argues that the most promising account of mental unity preserving the Kantian insights can be found in Freud’s theory of the “ego,” an internal organization of mental events according to the “reality principle” and governed by elementary logical rules that allow us to acquire a reliable representation of the world.