Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The nature of selfhood or the self is among those topics that never lose the potential to instigate deep and lasting philosophical controversies. As a perennial topos, it remains one of the most discussed subjects even in current debates – without being tied to a certain philosophical paradigm or tradition. How should we talk about selfhood? How should we even start to define or determine what selfhood is? Associated with these basic questions is a set of further issues, which are no less controversial: Can experience tell us what selfhood is? And how can we investigate self-experience without having a pre-established notion of selfhood that tells us what qualifies as self-experience to begin with? In my talk, I shed light on these questions by focusing on skepticism about self-experience. In order to get a better grip on what it can mean to be skeptical about self-experience, I distinguish three forms of denying that self-experience is informative with regard to the nature of selfhood in a relevant sense: denying that we enjoy self-experience at all, denying that self-experience is anything more than mere appearance, denying that self-experience tells us anything beyond the fact that selfhood is real. Having identified these three forms of skepticism about self-experience, I explore which alternative views about self-experience remain an option. Prima facie it might seem that avoiding all three forms of skepticism must result in a type of Cartesianism. I suggest instead that Cartesianism is only one type or manifestation of a more general line of thinking which I introduce as self-experientialism. After presenting some other non-Cartesian formulations of self-experientialism, I argue that all versions of both, skepticism about self-experience and self-experientialism, are confronted with important challenges. Finally, I close with some suggestions as to how to proceed from here onwards.