Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Graduate Student, Institute of Philosophy

Thesis Title: Personal Identity and the Formal Self

About

I am a PhD-candidate in philosophy at the University of Leuven, Belgium. I am writing a dissertation on what the role of the formal self could be in the constitution of personal identity. I define the formal self as the self to which we refer (correctly), but which we do not first identify. Thus, it does not seem to be tied to any specific psychological or physical characteristics. I combine and evaluate insights from analytic philosophers (Wittgenstein, Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, P.F. Strawson, Quassim Cassam, Garreth Evans, David Wiggins, John McDowell) and phenomenologists (Sartre, Husserl) on this matter. I also have a special interest in conclusions drawn by psychologists, cognitive scientists and neurologists in this regard. I push hypotheses which they could test and aim to develop experiments which they could execute. I for example wish to find out how self-consciousness and self-referral (two different phenomena) differ in subjects who are and subjects who are not aware of their memory loss.