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PURPOSE AND THEME
Human beings differ from animals due to their self-consciousness: A consciousness of the very phenomenon of being conscious. But what constitutes self-consciousness? Wittgenstein investigates the question by analysing concrete phenomenona of consciousness such as memory and love. The same approach is taken in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and feminism. But also in analytic philosophy one finds today efforts to comprehend subjectivity. For instance, interest in German idealism is shown by prominent Wittgenstein scholars like Brandom and McDowell. The Danish Wittgenstein Network gathers representatives from these traditions to a research seminar on how the philosophy of psychology can increase our understanding of subjectivity and self-consciousness. SPEAKERS Mark Addis, Reader Faculty of Law, Humanities, Development and Society UCE Birmingham Chantal Bax, Ph.D. Student Institute of Logic, Language and Computation University of Amsterdam Steen Brock, Associate Professor Institute of Philosophy and History of Ideas University of Aarhus Svend Brinkmann, Assistant Professor Department of Psychology University of Aarhus Anne-Marie S. Christensen, Assistant Professor Institute for Philosophy, Education and the Study of Religions University of Southern Denmark Kirsten Hyldgaard, Associate Professor Department of Philosophy of Education The Danish University of Education Søren H. Klausen, Associate Professor Institute for Philosophy, Education and the Study of Religions University of Southern Denmark Anders Moe Rasmussen, Associate Professor Institute of Philosophy and History of Ideas University of Aarhus Dan Zahavi, Professor Department of Media, Cognition and Communication University of Copenhagen PROGRAMME Friday, October 6th
Saturday, October 7th
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ABSTRACTS Mark Addis: Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument and Self Consciousness The private language argument in Wittgenstein has important implications for how self consciousness should be characterised. Some recent cognitivist theories claim that the self is really the sense of being a mental presence whilst the body is merely a container for these vital mental attributes. The cognitivist perspective emphasizes that mental states are internal to the mind thereby promoting the notion that the self is separate from the body. The private language argument is used to critique cognitivism through an examination of the notion of privacy which this conception of mental states depends upon. How this assumption that the mental is essentially private leads to the supposition that it is intelligible to attribute self consciousness to either minds or bodies is investigated. On Wittgenstein’s view new theories of the self are not required but a grammatical investigation into the employment of ‘self consciousness’ and its cognates (including their psychological and neuroscientific uses) is. Kirsten Hyldgaard: Lacan's antipsychologism or the lack of the Other Key concepts for this paper will be castration ("lack"), repetition and transference. According to Freud, love or transference is a condition for being accessible to arguments, accessible to intellectual communications and explanations. Lacanians speak about "work transference" in order to conceptualise why we work at all and why it seems meaningful and stimulating to work with some people and impossible and sterile with others. Transference has to do with repetition (the famous Freudian "repetition of infantile relations"). If it is at all possible to speak about subjectivity, character or personality on the back ground of Lacanian psychoanalysis, repetition would be a key concept. Anders Moe Rasmussen: Feelings and the dynamics of the self Human life is such that it has to be continued. This self-continuation however manifests itself in and through different forms of emotional attitude ranging from pre-reflective sensations to highly reflective interpretations of human life characteristic of the so-callled moods. By drawing on ancient philosophical tradition - the stoic notion of "Oikeiosis" - as well as modern philosophy - Martin Heidegger's and Dieter Henrich's theories of "Stimmungen" - the close relation between the emotions and the dynamic structure of the self will be illustrated. Dan Zahavi: Consciousness and self-consciousness In the first part of my talk I will briefly present some of the main features of a phenomenological account of the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness. I will in particular focus on the idea that a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience, i.e., on the idea that the immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the second part, I will consider and review four objections to this account; objections that might be termed 1) the transparency objection, 2) the anonymity objection, 3) the relationality objection and 4) the object objection. Steen Brock: Subjectivity as spatiotemporal mediation of the nexus of life. Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Cassirer TBA Chantal Bax: Inner and outer, self and other: Subjectivity after Wittgenstein In much of his later work Wittgenstein seems to rethink several dichotomies that are central to any conception of human subjectivity. I will focus on two of those, namely, the distinction between mind and body or inner and outer, and the distinction between individual and community or self and other. Though Wittgenstein does not formulate a theory of subjectivity himself, a Wittgenstein-inspired account may be extracted from his writings by putting to work the parallels between his analysis of psychological phenomena and his analysis of aspect perception. On my reading Wittgenstein takes psychological phenomena to be aspects of the human being. According to Wittgenstein, to put it differently, inner and outer are intimately connected instead of almost accidentally related, and the self, far from being a wholly independent entity, from day one finds itself constituted by its relationships with others. After giving an outline of this Wittgensteinian account of subjectivity, I want to examine and evaluate it in more detail. I will, more precisely, put this framework to the test by applying it to two other sources of philosophical problems that Wittgenstein explored: religious belief and rule following. The way one portrays the aforementioned distinctions should namely have repercussions for how one deals with issues such as those concerning faith and normativity. Wittgenstein does for instance not maintain that going to church once a week is a necessary and sufficient condition for being a religious person. But if he neither takes faith to be a (literally) inner process, what other explanation can he give? Also, Wittgenstein repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the community when it comes to normativity. Yet is the ability to make and break conventions not to some extent an individual capacity? Is the community itself, moreover, not constituted by the individuals that are its members? Examining Wittgenstein's remarks on religious belief and rule following from the perspective of his ideas on subjectivity will hopefully enable us to fully appreciate Wittgenstein's take on the inner/outer and self/other distinction, and see what difference his views effectively make. Søren H. Klausen: The metaphysics of the self There has been a tremendous revival of non-reductionist views in the philosophy of mind. But most contemporary non-reductionists remain reductionists about the self, as they maintain a Hume-inspired "bundle" theory of the mind. Recently, however, philosophers like Levine, Dainton, Chalmers and Bayne have pointed to certain peculiar phenomenological features of the mind which seem to indicate a need for reintroducing a more substantial notion of selfhood. I will examine the arguments for and against positing a self as something over and above individual conscious states. I shall argue that there is a strong case for non-reductionism about the self, but that the relevant notion of selfhood is different from, and in some sense weaker than, the one which has usually been the target of reductionist criticism. Svend Brinkmann: The normativity of the mental: A de-psychologization of psychology In this presentation, I shall argue the Wittgensteinian point that we can undo the psychologizing of psychology by conceiving of mental life as lived in the space of reasons. I argue that mental life as studied by psychology - comprising human action, feeling, and thinking - is constituted by normative connections and necessities rather than causal ones. I will illustrate this point through an analysis of human emotional life, in which a broadly Wittgensteinian approach will be contrasted with the currently influential approach of Antonio Damasio. I will further claim that although the source of the normativity of mental life is found in historically evolved social practices, not all normativity is conventional or historically contingent. Anne-Marie S. Christensen: Wittgenstein and subjectivity: Pictures of the Self The concept of 'picture' plays a central role throughout Wittgenstein's writings. In the later writings we find at least two discussions of the interdependence between our use of pictures and our notion of self. First of all, Wittgenstein shows pictures to be a vital, as well as a potentially distorting factor in our general view of human subjectivity. The metaphors we use to describe human self serves to express elements our particular form of human existence, but they also leads us on, almost forcing us to accept certain views of subjectivity. However, Wittgenstein furthermore shows that this active dimension in the use of picture also has a positive role, as we use pictures to shape and develop the way we look at others as well as our selves. |