Béatrice Longuenesse

There are striking structural similarities between Freud's ego and Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, which for Kant grounds our use of ‘I’ in ‘I think’. There are also striking similarities between Freud's superego and Kant's account of the mental structure that grounds our use of ‘I’ in the moral ‘I ought to’. The paper explores these similarities on three main points: the conflict of motivations internal to the mind, the relation between discursive and pre-discursive representation of moral motivation, and the unconscious character of moral motivation. The suggestion is that Freud offers resources for a naturalized account (an account in terms of the causal development of empirical human beings) of just those features of our moral motivation that, according to Kant, seem to make it least amenable to a naturalistic explanation. How much of a revision of Kant's analysis of moral justification is thereby entailed is beyond the purview of the paper.

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

Kant’s and Freud’s respective investigations of the mind obey fundamentally different concerns. And yet their views of the structure of our mental life are strikingly similar. The article explores some of those similarities. It compares Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and the organization of mental processes Freud calls ‘ego’ (Ich). It then proceeds to compare Kant’s categorical imperative of morality and Freud’s structure of ego/superego (Ich/Überich). Freud’s structural view of the mind, it is suggested, might offer a developmental account of just those aspects of mental life Kant thought could be explained only by appealing to our belonging in a noumenal world escaping the deterministic laws of the natural world. However, Freud’s approach is exclusively developmental. He does not take any position on questions of justification, the very questions that are central to Kant’s concern. The paper offers a cautious response to the question: what remains, under the Freudian developmental account, of the justificatory ambition of Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative as an imperative of pure practical reason?