Professor Giovanna Colombetti University of Exeter

Event details

Objects and the situated self: beyond narration

Recent analytic-philosophical works in the field of situated cognition have proposed to conceptualize the self as deeply entwined with the environment, and even as constituted by it. A common move has been to characterize the self in nar­rative terms, and then to argue that the narrative self is partly constituted by narratives about the past that are scaffolded (shaped and maintained) by, or distributed over, a variety of objects that can rekindle episodic memories. While I am sympathetic to these approaches, here I propose a different strategy to situate the self—one which can be seen as complementing the narrative one, and which draws from concepts and ideas central to the phenomenological-existentialist tradition. I suggest, first, that the self has a sense of its past not just via narratives and episodic memories, but in virtue of being embodied and thus, importantly, sedimented (in other words, it has, or rather is, a body memory). Embodiment and sedimentation, in turn, always necessarily imply an environment or a situation, entailing that the self is also inher­ently situated. I also briefly discuss the future-oriented dimension of selfhood, and argue that we understand ourselves as projected into the future, again not necessarily only narratively and reflectively, but also tacitly, in a bodily and inherently situated way.