Foreign thinker
Sebastian Gardner
Sebastian GardnerKant's Philosophy and German IdealismBritish
Life and Thought
Sebastian Gardner (born 1960) is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He specializes in Kant, German Idealism, Sartre, Freud, and psychoanalytic theory, and has published important works in these areas.
Sebastian Angus Gardner was born on 19 March 1960. He received his BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1982 and 1987, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was devoted to Sartre's critique of Freud and was later turned into a book. Gardner initially taught at Birkbeck College, London, and has been Professor of Philosophy at University College London (UCL) since 1998.
His main areas of research include Kant, nineteenth-century German philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche), Sartre, Freud, and psychoanalytic theory. His major books include Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (1993), Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (1999), and Sartre's Being and Nothingness (2009). He has also edited works on aesthetics and art.
Gardner is known for his rigorous philosophical interpretations of psychoanalysis and German Idealism, and has sought to reconstruct perspectives on the unconscious while preserving the Sartrean critique of Freud. His works are considered standard resources for the study of Kant and contemporary continental philosophy.