I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again

Beatrice Longuenesse presents an original exploration of our understanding of ourselves and the way we talk about ourselves. She draws on contemporary philosophy of language and mind and on the history of philosophy from Kant to Sartre and Wittgenstein, and on Freudian psychoanalysis. She argues that our uses of ‘I’ depend on two fundamental kinds of self-consciousness, distinct but mutually dependent: our consciousness of being engaged in bringing rational unity into the contents of of our mental states; and our consciousness of our own body. And she shows how in using ‘I’ we may express radically individual experiences as well as thoughts that make a claim to validity for all human beings.