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.

Philipp Schmidt studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Vienna. In 2021, he obtained his PhD degree in philosophy from Heidelberg University with the work titled Self-Experience and the Feeling of Being Oneself. He has been a Research Assistant at the Universities of Graz, Vienna, and Darmstadt. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Würzburg. His work is in the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and philosophy of psychiatry. Recent research focuses on selfhood and sociality, emotions, affectivity, and agency.

Organitza: Marta Jorba (Humanitats, UPF) & LOGOS (UB)