'Kant and Freud on the Mind'
Professor Béatrice Longuenesse will deliver the Isaiah Berlin Lectures in Michaelmas Term 2022. Professor Longuenesse is Silver Professor, Professor of Philosophy Emerita (NYU) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her lectures will take place on Weds 9th, Weds 16th, Thurs 17th and Thurs 24th November, at 5pm. The lectures will be given in the Lecture Theatre Room at the H B Allen Centre, 25 Banbury Road, Oxford (note that this is not the Keble College main site). It is intended that there will be a discussion session at the Faculty of Philosophy, in the Faculty's Ryle Room at the Radcliffe Humanities Building on Woodstock Road.
Abstract
It may seem surprising to compare the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, with Sigmund Freud, the founder of a discipline which explores the darkest, most irrational aspects of our minds. But as a matter of historical fact, Freud is the direct heir of a nineteenth century school of naturalistic philosophy of mind which called itself “physiological Kantianism.” This makes it less surprising that the structures of mental life we find in what Freud called his “metapsychology” should be, in important respects, comparable to those we find in Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
The goal of these lectures is not to repeat arguments I have developed elsewhere concerning the structural similarities between Kant’s and Freud’s respective views of the mind. Rather, the goal is to put those arguments to the test by focusing on specific questions such as the following. What is the role and import of unity and disunity in our mental life, according to Kant’s and Freud’s respective views of the mind? To what extent and in what sense does Kant acknowledge the existence of mental representations and mental activities of which we are not conscious? To what extent is Freud justified in claiming radical novelty for his concept of “the unconscious”? What are the consequences of Kant’s and Freud’s respective accounts of the mind for our normative and moral attitudes?
9 Nov: 'Conflicting Logics of the Mind'
16 Nov: 'Kant on Consciousness and its Limits'
17 Nov: 'Freud’s Concept of the Unconscious'
24 Nov: 'The “Morality System”'
