There is a deep and fundamental difference between two kinds of things: conscious individuals and what one may call mere things. Conscious individuals are capable of having experiential properties, properties such that it is like something to have them. Examples of experiential properties: being sad, enjoying a beautiful landscape, experiencing oneself as active in what one does. Conscious individuals have an ‘inner perspective’, there ‘is a world for them’. Mere things have no experiential properties, no ‘inner perspective’, there is no world for them.
In the seminar we will discuss, based on recent publications, questions such as the following: what exactly is the difference between conscious individuals and mere thing? What is their place in the world of concrete physical objects? Are conscious subjects jut complex physical objects or do they belong to a different category of individuals? Is consciousness real or is it, as some have recently argued, only an illusion?
- Enseignant·e: Martine Nida-Rümelin