The present thesis tackles two (only apparently) completely independent questions: the experiential self and the debate on the role and status of normative reasons. In the first chapter, I briefly present two of the currently most influential accounts of the self within the framework of experiential minimalism, along with some crucial difficulties that both accounts are faced with. Then, I show that these stubborn conceptual knots follow from two implicit presuppositions that are shared by both views (and which I term hyperminimalism). On the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and, most importantly, the embodied/enacted cognition paradigm, I attempt to develop a different account of the self, which avoids these difficulties while still remaining within the constraints of experiential minimalism. The second chapter explores some implications of the view presented in the first chapter (along with embodied/enacted cognition in general) for the debate on externalism and internalism about normative reasons in contemporary metaethics. More specifically, I claim that the fundamental role that embodied/enacted cognition assigns to affectivity can offer a novel approach to this problem, which might best be understood as a specific form of constitutivism. This view, which I provisionally term metaethical organicism, builds on a different understanding of reason and affectivity, which was developed primarily by Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty and Varela (and which forms a crucial part of the embodied view of the self and subjectivity that is presented in the first chapter).
|
