Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-05-28

Understanding the Concept of Self as a Phenomenal Concept

Objective

"Each subject uses a concept of self (or ‘I’) to reflect on and store information about herself. Possessing this concept, and thus being able of explicit self-representation, is arguably what makes a creature a fully-fledged self, or subject. The fundamental hypothesis of the proposal is that this I-concept is interestingly akin to phenomenal concepts (i.e. those concepts, like “red”, “shrill” or ""painful"" we use to describe how our experiences feel to us).

The key research questions that this new theory is designed to answer are: (1) What is the semantics of the self-concept, i.e. what representational mechanism do we deploy to refer to ourselves through it? (2) How does the proposed semantics help solve some open philosophical issues concerning the self-concept? These include issues (2a) in epistemology; (2b) in the metaphysics of persons and moral philosophy. (3) What further implications does the proposed semantics have for issues raised by the self-concept in neighbouring disciplines, such as cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and psychopathology?

(1) I propose a new semantics for the I-concept, conceived for the first time as a special type of phenomenal concept; this semantics is inspired by that of a class of linguistic expressions called indexicals. (2a) On this basis, I transpose what is known about phenomenal knowledge to the case of self-knowledge. (2b) The theory also suggests a new account of what grounds the special value we ascribe to persons as such, and why subjects care about their own survival through time. (3) I argue that psychiatric troubles (e.g. schizophrenia, Cotard syndrome) affecting personal identity and the mastery of ‘I’ come from a dysfunction of the phenomenal “sense of self” I posit to explain how we can come to acquire a self-concept."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
EU contribution
€ 221 606,40
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data
My booklet 0 0