Béatrice Longuenesse holds the Spinoza Chair of the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities in the second term of the academic year 2016-2017 and will be delivering the accompanying two Spinoza Lectures on ‘The first person in Cognition and Morality’.

Longuenesse’s first Spinoza Lecture is entitled ‘Perplexing ‘I’.

Some philosophers have argued that using ‘I’ is the source of illusions, for instance the illusion that I am the author of my actions and thoughts rather than thoughts and actions happening to me, or in me.  Lichtenberg maintained that “we should say ‘it thinks’ or ‘there is thinking going on’ rather than ‘I think’.” In the same vein, Nietzsche urged that “a thought comes when it wills, not when I will.” And nevertheless, using ‘I’ seems to be an indispensible tool for each individual person to refer to herself. What do our uses of ‘I’ reveal about our relations to ourselves, to others, and to the world?

On Thursday 8 June, Longuenesse will be holding a second Spinoza Lecture entitled ‘Two unlikely bedfellows: Kant and Freud on Morality‘.