Heward Wilkinson – Is Freud a Philosopher? – South London Philosophy Circle

Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/08/2025
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Freud is a mythic figure to many in the psychotherapy traditions, and a figure of offense, contempt, and ridicule to many others. Both these stances make it hard to assess him as a philosopher.

Heward has supplied two papers
Jerome Wakefield, Introduction to Freud and Philosophy of Mind
And:
Freud’s paper on The Unconscious.

For the very keen, it is worth linking this paper with Freud’s profound short paper on Negation of which I give a commentary along with Jean Hippolyte’s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hyppolite] commentary, plus all the relevant textual material at:
https://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/sites/default/files/Freud-Hegel-and-Dialectics2.pdf

Heward suggests that Wakefield’s Introduction is read first and then at least section I of Freud’s paper.
His twofold question is:

1. Is Freud, as Wakefield argues, a philosopher of mind in line with modern cognitive psychology?

2. If so, does this perhaps lead to an even wider conception of Freud as philosopher than Wakefield envisages, for instancce in Lacan and Derrida? In this connection I draw attention to the very subtle remark in a bracket on the belief in Other Minds in the second paragraph on p119 of this version of the paper and I shall give other instances.

I shall also touch on Freud’s deep relation, which Wakefield rightly emphasises, to the philosopher Franz Brentano, teacher of both Freud and Edmund Husserl, and pioneer identifier of the whole conception of Intentionality, so important in Phenomenology and even, via John Searle [Intentionality], now in the Anglo philosophy world as well.

We meet in The Rose Battersea, 74-76 Battersea Bridge Road, London SW11 3AG but Heward Wilkinson is not London based and will present his talk on Zoom. For details see SLPC Zoom Meeting

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