Béatrice Longuenesse's work primarily delves into the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel. Her scholarship meticulously examines Kant's concept of judgment and its profound implications for his ethical and epistemological theories. She also offers insightful critiques of Hegelian metaphysics, illuminating the intricate dialogues between these seminal thinkers. Longuenesse's writing is characterized by its intellectual rigor and nuanced analysis, providing readers with fresh perspectives on enduring philosophical questions.
Beatrice Longuenesse explores the two aspects of our conception of ourselves when we use the pronoun 'I': how the possibility of first-person thought is internally related to objective, shareable judgments, and how the tacit egoism of the first person is internally related to the impersonal or universal standpoint of morality.
Beatrice 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
Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, moral philosophy, and aesthetic theory, under one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgments. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgments. Her book will appeal to all interested in Kant and his thought, ranging over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgments, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art.
The result is a systematic, persuasive new interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason.