The Subject of Experiences: The Significance of its Metaphysical Nature in the Philosophy of Mind

Status: Abgeschlossen (01.12.2019 - 29.02.2024) | Finanzierung: SNF | Projektblatt öffnen

This project will focus on the metaphysics of the subject of experiences, that is, on the nature of entities which can have experiences (including conscious animals as well as humans). There has been increasing attention paid to different issues relevant to this topic in recent years, but as of yet there has been no systematic study showing how these issues are interrelated and how they can be integrated into a substantive account of the nature of the subject. To fill this gap, we shall propose the following hypothesis: each subject is a substance, distinct from its body but necessarily embodied, and it is essentially a subject. We shall provide new arguments in defence of this conception, and also show how it can provide novel accounts of what it is for a subject to be embodied, to have a perspective on the word, and for its experiences to be unified. This conception, therefore, promises to provide a comprehensive and unified metaphysical account of the subject, which will have important ramifications for other issues in the philosophy of mind. In the course of our work we shall address the following Research Questions: RQ1. To which ontological category does the subject of experience belong, e.g., is it a substance, a bundle of experiences, a collection of mental capacities, etc? RQ2. Are the entities which are subjects essentially subjects? RQ3. What is the metaphysical nature of embodiment, i.e., what is it, metaphysically speaking, for a subject to be embodied? RQ4. What is the nature of the subject’s first-person perspective? RQ5. What is the metaphysical relation between the subject of experiences and the unity of experiences? Investigating each of these questions is crucial providing an overall metaphysical account of the nature of the subject. The view we propose can only hold together if all five are discussed in detail. The hypotheses we wish to defend regarding the research questions are as follows: the subject is a substance (RQ1) and each subject is essentially a subject (RQ2). A subject can be embodied to different degrees, and this can be accounted for on a view which takes each subject to be an emergent individual (RQ3). We shall distinguish several different senses in which a subject has a perspective and investigate their interrelation; for instance, we shall suggest that the sense of being located at a specific point in space and time requires having a unique perspective on one’s own experiences in a way which does not allow for reduction in, e.g., functional terms (RQ4). A subject’s experiences are unified in a significant way simply by belonging to that subject, and this unity cannot be reductively explained (RQ5).

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