Darnell, Michelle R.

Dr. Michelle Darnell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fayetteville State University; she has previously taught and continues to teach courses at Methodist College in Fayetteville, NC. Dr. Darnell specializes in Kant and 19th-20th century European philosophy, though she has varied interest in such areas as Eastern Philosophy and Logic. She has engaged in extensive research and published on Jean-Paul Sartre.

Self in the Theoretical Writings of Sartre and Kant

2005 0-7734-6012-8
This book argues that Kant and Sartre share a significant number of fundamental philosophical theses by exploring Sartre’s critiques against Kant. Beginning with The Transcendence of the Ego, it is shown that Sartre’s misconception of transcendental philosophy resulted in him not giving sufficient consideration to the ontological claims made by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason, which led to Sartre’s confusion on the relation between Kant’s and his own account of self. After a consideration of their views on what the self is, Sartre’s writings on the reflective and the pre-reflective cogito in Being and Nothingness are compared to Kant’s accounts of inner sense and apperception. Ultimately, it is shown that the task of knowing self exemplifies the more general problem of the metaphysical and epistemic relation of subject to objects, and, like Kant, Sartre draws a transcendental distinction between things as they appear and as they are in themselves.