Alfred Tauber (Boston University / Cohn Institute), Requiem for the Ego: Inter-war philosophers on Freud 

 

Monday, January 21st, 18:00

Gilman Building, Hall 449

 

Chair: Menachem Fisch (Cohn Institute)

 

Adorno, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the major philosophical voices of the inter-War period, each attacked Freud on the same basis, namely, his representational model of the mind.  In their respective ways, each criticized Freud's Kantian construct and in this fashion they mounted influential challenges to modernist notions of subjectivity, which laid the foundations for postmodernism.   That story illuminates a major intellectual theme of the 20th century and, more specifically, illustrates how these divergent philosophies converged on the same philosophical issue and drew similar conclusions.  In short, Freud provided the philosophical forum for re-formulating notions of agency and personal identity that reached far beyond psychoanalysis.