Béatrice Longuenesse

Kant soutient qu’une table complète et systématique des catégories peut être établie selon le « fil conducteur » des fonctions logiques du jugement. La première partie de cet article est une exposition de l’argument kantien. La deuxième partie est un examen de quelques-unes des objections formulées à l’encontre du « fil conducteur » de Kant. Je conclus que l’appropriation contemporaine de la doctrine kantienne des catégories est désormais divisée entre deux problèmes distincts : celui du contenu conceptuel (ou non) de la perception, et celui des structures conceptuelles présupposées par une image scientifique particulière du monde.

Le présent essai tente de tirer au clair les différentes significations des termes « conscient » et « conscience » dans la philosophie critique de Kant et en particulier dans la Critique de la raison pure. On considère d’abord les divers types de représentations et ce que veut dire Kant lorsqu’il les dit « avec » ou « sans » conscience. On considère ensuite le concept de conscience tel qu’il apparaît dans la Déduction transcendantale des catégories, où il ne réfère pas à une qualité de représentations particulières, mais à une attitude active de l’esprit. Considérée dans son ensemble, la conception kantienne de la « conscience » mêle inséparablement un aspect que nous appelons, après T. Nagel, « conscience phénoménale », et un aspect proche de la « conscience d’accès » selon N. Block, dans lequel cependant la conscience de soi, exprimable par la proposition « Je pense », joue un rôle central. Cette combinaison fait de Kant un interlocuteur unique dans les débats contemporains sur la conscience et son rôle dans notre vie mentale, ainsi que sur l’IA et sa signification pour l’avenir de l’humanité.

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.

According to Kant, the rationalist notion of a person as a thinking substance, conscious of its own identity through time, trades on an ambiguity concerning the meaning of ‘being conscious of the numerical identity of oneself at different times’. I argue that against the rationalist notion, Kant endorses the notion of a person as a spatio-temporal entity endowed with unity of apperception and capable of knowing its own identity through time according to empirical criteria of identification and re-identification. Nevertheless, Kant maintains that the rationalist notion is both ‘necessary and sufficient for practical use’. I argue that in fact, Kant's empirical notion of a person was sufficient even for the purposes of his moral philosophy. I conclude by comparing my analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Kant's view with Peter Strawson's analysis of Kant's argument in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

In response to Henry Allison's and Sally Sedwick's comments on my recent book, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, I explain Kant's description of the understanding as being essentially a "capacity to judge", and his view of the relationship between the categories and the logical functions of judgment. I defend my interpretation of Kant's argument in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the B edition. I conclude that, in my interpretation, Kant's notions of the "a priori" and the "given" are more complex and flexible than is generally perceived. Nevertheless, Kant maintains a strict distinction between receptivity and spontaneity, the "passive" and the "active" aspects of our representational capacities. This separates him from his German idealist successors, most notably Fichte and Hegel. Contrary to Sedgwick's and Allison's suggestions, I do not think that my interpretation tends to blur this distinction.

Hegel's Science of Logic has received less attention than his Phenomenology of Spirit, but Hegel himself took it to be his highest philosophical achievement and the backbone of his system. The present book focuses on this most difficult of Hegel’s published works. Béatrice Longuenesse offers a close analysis of core issues, including discussions of what Hegel means by ‘dialectical logic’, the role and meaning of ‘contradiction’ in Hegel’s philosophy, and Hegel’s justification for the provocative statement that ‘what is actual is rational, what is rational is actual’. She examines both Hegel's debt and his polemical reaction to Kant, and shows in great detail how his project of a ‘dialectical’ logic can be understood only in light of its relation to Kant’s ‘transcendental’ logic. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Hegel's philosophy and its influence on contemporary philosophical discussion

Kants Unterscheidung zwischen Bewusstsein seiner selbst „als Subjekt” und Bewusstsein seiner selbst „als Objekt” ist in jüngster Zeit lebendig diskutiert worden. Der Artikel bietet eine Diskussion des üblichen Vorwurfs, dem zufolge Kant ignoriert, dass ich, als Subjekt, meiner selbst als eines physischen Objektes beziehungsweise eines lebendigen Körpers bewusst bin. Gegen Quassim Cassams Argument zu dieser These argumentiert der Artikel, dass Kants Begriff des Ichs eher im Lichte seiner Rolle bei der Einigung unserer Vorstellungen zu verstehen ist als im Lichte zeitgenössischer Überlegungen dazu, in welchen Arten das „Ich” auf den eigenen Körper bezogen werden kann.

In this collection of essays Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, his moral philosophy and his aesthetic theory, under one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgements. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world - what Kant calls the 'human point of view' - have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgements. Her discussion ranges over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgements, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant and his thought.

Many philosophers as well as many biological psychologists think that recent experiments in neuropsychology have definitively discredited any notion of freedom of the will. I argue that the arguments mounted against the concept of freedom of the will in the name of natural causal determinism are valuable but not new, and that they leave intact a concept of freedom of the will that is compatible with causal determinism. After explaining this concept, I argue that it is interestingly related to our use of the first person pronoun “I.” I discuss three examples of our use of “I” in thought and language and submit a few questions I would like neuropsychologists to answer concerning the brain processes that might underlie those uses. I suggest answering these questions would support the compatibilist notion of freedom of the will I have offered in part 1 of the paper