This paper sets to cull Béatrice Longuenesse’s recent work on the first-person ‘I’ and put forth a novel Kantian approach to the first-person reference of mental states, working in the tradition of P.F.

Thus Kant’s metaphysical-scientific dualism: (scientific) knowledge is limited to the world of phenomena-the world of appearance-while the thing-in-itself is unknowable because there is no intuition that can correspond to the it. Although concepts and intuition are radically separated mental powers, without a way of bringing them together (i.e., synthesis) there is no knowledge for Kant. What is crucial to Kant’s famous claim that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty is the idea that we have no knowledge unless we combine concepts with intuition. Understanding, for Kant, does not intuit, and intuition-which involves empirical information, i.e., sense-data-does not entail thinking. Mensch's work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers-Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas-even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others-the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self.

To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity.

Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide.

Kant and reason