“I think therefore I was”
Sartre, Kant, and the self
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21597660 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Henry Somers-Hall (0000-0002-5137-0402, Royal Holloway University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1185-1206 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | British Journal for the History of Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0960-8788 • E-ISSN: 1469-3526 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09608788.2024.2442922 |
| OpenAlex | W4406899130 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 20 |
The aim of this paper is to develop a new reconstruction of Sartre’s arguments against Kant’s account of the unity of experience in the transcendental deduction. In the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre presents several arguments to show that Kant is unwarranted in moving from the claim that we can attach an ‘I think’ to our representations to the claim that this is made possible by a synthetic unity of apperception. While Sartre’s criticism of Kant’s conception of the ego is central to Sartre’s existential philosophy, there is still little agreement on what Sartre’s criticisms actually amount to, let alone whether these criticisms are successful. I argue that to make sense of Sartre’s argument here, we must see it as relying on a distinction between two different models of what it is for something to be organized or determined. By doing so, we can see why Sartre believes consciousness does not need the ‘I think’ in order to be unified, but also why Sartre believes we are nonetheless led to posit this moment of unification
Epistemology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |