Sebastian Gardner
Sebastian Angus Gardner (born 19 March 1960) is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy in the University College London. He is known for his expertise on Kant, German Idealism, Sartre and Freud, and for his philosophical interpretations and investigations in the subject of psychoanalytic theory. Education and career Gardner earned his B.A. in 1982 and his Ph.D. in 1987, both from Cambridge University. His doctoral thesis, later revised into a book publication, dealt with Sartre's critique of Freud. He taught first at Birkbeck College, London and, since 1998, at UCL. He has written extensively on Freud and psychoanalysis, on Kant, and on post-Kantian philosophy, including Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche. His 1993 book Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis attempted to justify a view of the psychoanalytic subject and the unconscious which nevertheless maintained fidelity to Sartre's critique of the Freudian unconscious and the censorship mechanism. Gardner argues for the failure of sub-systemic theories of the mind (such as those of cognitive psychology) to provide a framework for actively irreconcilable or self-contradicting actions, utterances, or impulses, which can be conceptualised as internal to the subject. He therefore distinguishes between the propositional structure of consciousness which is distorted by the