King’s History of Philosophy Workshop on the Self

Programme:

10.00-11.15 John Callanan: Kant's Metaphysics of the Self

Kant is traditionally viewed as a critic of the metaphysics of the soul and a proponent of a non-metaphysical conception of selfhood. In recent decades however, many commentators have interpreted Kant as being committed to a metaphysics of the self. I review some of these recent interpreters and consider how their views might be reconciled with the Critical project’s approach to metaphysical explanation.

11.30 -12.45 Mark Textor: Lotze's Master Argument: From the Unity of Consciousness to the Self

Influential 19th century German philosophers of mind promoted a psychology without a soul. Hermann Lotze is their main opponent. He argues that this project is doomed. In my talk I will assess his main argument.

Lunch break (own arrangements)

14.15-15.30 Rory Madden: Frege on Idealism and the Self

It is not widely known that Frege’s ’Thought’ contains an argument which, in the tradition of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, aims to refute a sceptical or idealist hypothesis on the basis of premises about self-consciousness. In this talk I reconstruct and assess Frege’s argument.

15.45 - 17.00 Nilanjan Das: Can we Coherently Deny the Existence of the Self?

Indian Buddhist philosophers defended the thesis that there is no substantially or ultimately real thing such as a self. The non-Buddhist Brahmanical philosophers resisted this claim. In this essay, I focus on one such philosopher: the 6th century Nyāya philosopher, Uddyotakara. He argued that the Buddhists cannot coherently deny the existence of the self, i.e., that the statement "The self doesn't exist'' involves a contradiction. Here, I unpack Uddyotakara's arguments for this surprising thesis. I show that the thesis follows from three distinct components of his philosophy of language: (i) his semantics of negative existentials, (ii) his theory of how the first-person pronoun works, and (iii) his view that simple expressions of language must have referents.

17.15-18.30 Maria Rosa Antognazza: Knowledge and the First Person

In my paper I argue that knowledge is essentially – that is, primarily, fundamentally, paradigmatically – first-personal. To use a slogan, ‘each one of us has to do her own knowing’. Knowledge, in its primary and paradigmatic sense, is not a bundle of information that can be passed on as a parcel. Strictly speaking and at its most fundamental, knowledge cannot be transferred because each one of us has to see, grasp, perceive for herself (either literally in sense-perception or metaphorically in intellectual perception) the object of knowledge. In this regard, knowledge is similar to understanding – or, more precisely, understanding is a paradigmatic manifestation of knowledge in its primary sense.

The first part of the paper is devoted to laying some groundwork for this notion of first- person knowledge through a discussion of how we arrive, in the first place, at the distinction between subject and object, I and not-I. I begin by summarizing some seminal philosophical accounts regarding the nature of mental phenomena and first-personal thought, drawing on remarks by Brentano, Husserl, Hume, Berkeley, and Williamson. I conclude the first part of with a discussion of Anscombe’s claim that the I does not refer. I unpack this insight by proposing an account of the distinction between I and not-I, ‘subject’ and ‘object’.

In the second part of the paper I turn to the nature of knowledge. I will contrast First Person and Self-Knowledge outlining a distinction between first-order and second-order knowledge of the self. I conclude that knowledge in its paradigmatic form is essentially first-personal in the sense that its object-directness requires a built-in awareness of the I as the unifying perspective from which an aliud (a not-I, an object) is apprehended qua aliud. This is a first-order awareness which is crucially distinct from the second-order awareness which requires a reflective cognitive act – a distinction which I propose to cash out in terms of ‘first-person knowledge’ versus ‘self-knowledge’.