ABSTRACT

"The minimal self and the flying man argument"

It has become almost standard to distinguish between what has been called the minimal self (or sometimes minimal self-experience) and the narrative self. The notion of the minimal self has been linked with the phenomenological concept of prereflective experience, and has served in explanations of bodily self-awareness, sense of ownership, and sense of agency. It’s referenced in experiments on the Rubber Hand Illusion. It also plays a role in characterizations of schizophrenia as a self-disorder. In this presentation I’ll explain some of the philosophical background to this concept, clarify its relation to the body and to social factors, and discuss the relevance of a very old thought experiment about sensory deprivation – Avicenna’s Flying Man argument.

BIO

Shaun Gallagher, PhD, Hon DPhil., is an American philosopher. He is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong (AU). He is currently Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department, Sapienza, Universita di Roma. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18) and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway); Durham (UK) and Copenhagen (DK), as well as visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, and Oxford. His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social cognition, and concepts of self. His publications include Action and Interaction (Oxford 2020); Performance/Art: The Venetian Lectures (Milan 2021); The Phenomenological Mind (Routledge 2021 – 3rd ed); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford 2017); The Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); Phenomenology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012); How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford 2005); as editor, the Oxford Handbook of the Self (Oxford 2011); and co-editor The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.