Professor Béatrice Longuenesse FBA

Summary

Longuenesse’s first book-length monograph was 'Hegel et la Critique de la Métaphysique', translated into English as 'Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics'. Her second book-length monograph was 'Kant et le Pouvoir de juger', translated into English as 'Kant and the Capacity to Judge'. The book challenged then dominant interpretations of Kant in the English-speaking world, influenced by Peter Strawson’s ground-breaking 'the Bounds of Sense'. Against Strawson, Longuenesse emphasised the significance of Kant’s particular brand of post-Aristotelian “logic of ideas” for Kant’s critical system. She also challenged Strawson’s hasty dismissal of what he contemptuously called “the imaginary topic of transcendental imagination.” On both points the book influenced a new turn in Kant scholarship. Longuenesse extended her results in 'Kant on the Human Standpoint'.

Longuenesse then turned her attention to Kant’s analysis of “I think”, which she took to be partly influenced by the Cartesian “Cogito, ergo sum” and partly polemically directed against the Cartesian argument. In 'I, Me, Mine. Back to Kant, and Back Again', she extended her analysis of the first-person pronoun to contemporary philosophy of language and mind and to Freudian psychoanalysis. 

Her research on the first-person was continued in her Spinoza Lectures 'The First Person in Cognition and Morality' and in her most recent book: 'The Organization of the Mind, Lessons from Kant and Freud'. She is now at work trying to understand the connections between those areas of research and what we learn about the mind/brain from neuroscience and computational artificial intelligence. Those connections have consequences for our understanding of the differences between first-person and third-person approaches to the human mind.