Béatrice Longuenesse
Silver Professor, Professor of Philosophy Emerita, New York University
Howison Lectures in Philosophy
November 8, 2023 — 4:10 PMAlumni House, Toll Room — UC Berkeley Campus
Watch lecture recording About the Lecture In this lecture, I examine Elizabeth Anscombe’s analysis of our use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ and its relation to self-consciousness. I argue that Anscombe’s account receives unexpected support from a philosophical approach which … Continued
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About the Lecture
In this lecture, I examine Elizabeth Anscombe’s analysis of our use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ and its relation to self-consciousness. I argue that Anscombe’s account receives unexpected support from a philosophical approach which is very different from hers: Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological description of consciousness, self-consciousness, and their expression in our use of ‘I.’ Anscombe’s characterization of self-consciousness as the non-observational, non-inferential, “unmediated conception of actions, happenings and states” is close to Sartre’s characterization of what he calls “non-thetic” or “non-positional” self-consciousness.
However, pace Anscombe, Sartre gives us tools to understand ‘I’ as referring, in any of its uses, to a person (something Anscombe denies). When premised on non-thetic self-consciousness, our use of ‘I,’ for Sartre, is not premised on our consciousness of an object in the world (a particular person). Nevertheless, ‘I’ refers to an existing entity of which we can also be conscious, in a different type of self-consciousness Sartre calls “reflective consciousness,” as an object in the world. In terms closer to those of Anscombe’s analysis, we could say that ‘I,’ in non-thetic self-consciousness, refers to an entity without a mode of presentation of that entity. But the very entity to which ‘I’ refers without a mode of presentation can also be referred to under a mode of presentation, e.g., the concept of a person. Anscombe, at least in “The First Person,” refused to consider that option. I submit it’s a loss for her analysis. I argue that Sartre’s phenomenological description offers tools for a friendly amendment to Anscombe’s semantic analysis. But conversely, Anscombe’s semantic analysis offers tools for a clarification of Sartre’s view.
About Béatrice Longuenesse
Béatrice Longuenesse is Silver Professor, Professor of Philosophy Emerita at New York University, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), the University of Paris-Sorbonne and Princeton University. She started her academic career in France before joining the philosophy department at Princeton University in 1993, where she became Full Professor in 1996. She left Princeton for NYU in 2004.
Her books include Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998); Kant on the Human Standpoint (2005); Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (2007); I, Me, Mine. Back to Kant, and Back again (2017); and The First Person in Cognition and Morality (2019). She co-edited, with Daniel Garber, Kant and the Early Moderns (Princeton University Press, 2008) and edited Le Moi/the Self/le Soi (a special issue of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 2010).
Her current work spans the history of philosophy, especially Kant and nineteenth century German philosophy; the philosophy of language and mind; and philosophical issues related to Freudian psychanalysis. She is working on a book with the (provisional) title: The Organization of the Mind.
Photography by Keiko Ikeuchi for the Oxford Philosophy Magazine, University of Oxford.