Nel quadro delle attività didattiche dell'insegnamento di Storia della Filosofia moderna e contemporanea, che quest'anno si incentra sui criteri e le condizioni di persistenza nel tempo dell'identità materiale e personale, il 17 maggio alle ore 11 nel campus di p.le Europa il prof. Charles T. Wolfe dell'università di Ghent terrà, in lingua inglese, una conferenza di chiusura del corso su teorie materialiste del sé nell'illuminismo radicale.

Event:

Charles T. Wolfe (Researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences and at the Sarton Centre for History of Science of the University of Ghent) will lecture on “Early modern materialism and the self”

Organization:

The conference is organized within the frame of Cinzia Ferrini’s 2016-17 undergraduate course on personal identity (History of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy: DiSU), in association with Cinzia Chiandetti (DSV) and the Doctoral School in Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences (NeSC). Thanks are due to the Department of Humanities for funding the event.

Venue:

Università di Trieste, Edificio Q - I Piano

Location:

Aula emiciclo - Via Giorgieri, 5 

Schedule:

17 maggio 2017 ore 11:00

Rationale (by Cinzia Ferrini):

The 2016/17 course in History of Modern Contemporary Philosophy addresses such issues as: ‘what matters in identity over time’, ‘persistence’  and ‘personhood’. Since the origin of Western philosophy questions arise about the persistence over time of identitical material objects as well as people, despite the observable stream of qualitative and quantitative changes they undergo.

Against the background of the alternative Heraclitean and Protagorean accounts, the influential Platonic approach regarded judgments on being, identity and diversity about phenomena and ourselves, as belonging to reasoning and thoughts about sense perceptions, rather than to perceptions themselves. In Phaedo, Socrates argues for the existence of a simple, invariable and immaterial psyche within ourselves which, differing also in destiny from the perishable stuff of our compound bodies, allows trans-temporal self-reference as well as survival after death. This easy-to-Christianize legacy we shall retrace in standard contemporary reading of Cartesian substance dualism, according to which our self is the immaterial substance constituting a res cogitans, and we are the same self over time just insofar as we remain the same rational soul (mens). Hence, Descartes is seen to have assimilated the ‘I’ or ‘self’ to the soul. However, as Daniel Garber recently put it: “It is a historical prejudice that Cartesian dualism was a kind of default position for the seventeenth century, the position that every reader was likely to hold. In actuality, materialism was quite widespread”.

According to another popular reading, Locke’s anti-Cartesianism is at the root of his psychological-continuity view, based on memory and awareness criteria: our identity persists over time only insofar as we inherit the same mental features of our past, in the unfying mode of the continuity of life and consciousness. The climax of the de-substantialization of the self is Hume’s view. Hume argues that there is no impression of a simple and continued self, hence no idea of it and any belief in a persisting self is an illusion.

Charles Wolfe’s lecture will explore the juncture between the orthodox and prevalent views about the fundamentality of the inner  sense or ‘intuition’ of the self and the approach that questions it, by revealing the fiction of attributing identity to variable and interrupted objects. Against the background of the so-called ‘radical Enlightenment’, he shall account for the materialist theory of the self and the naturalization of spirit, by  focusing on Diderot’s Le Rêve de D’Alembert, which suggests assimilating the ‘self’ to different phenomena and processes associated with the nervous system and the functioning of the organism.