Is There a Self? Embodied Self-Experience and Cassirer’s Pluralistic Philosophy of Culture as an Antidote to the Crisis in Human Self-Knowledge
Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia November 28, 2025 DOI: 10.19195/1895-8001.20.2.4 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that embodied philosophy of mind, brought into dialogue with Ernst Cassirer's philosophy, can ground a view of selfhood that treats subjective and intersubjective experience as real and non-reducible, while avoiding both reductive scientific dismissal of experience and anti-scientific existential rhetoric. |
Abstract
A view on selfhood informed by contemporary scholarship of the embodied philosophy of mind is invaluable because it validates self-experience as real in a rich and integrative manner, neglecting neither experience nor science. Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and their empirical underpinnings are included as necessary, non-reducible parts of a greater whole of experience. This breaks away from decades of reductive scientific approaches to the mind which dismissed experience as an epiphenomenon of neural processes without explanatory value, as well as from anti-scientific rhetoric of the existential sort. Embodiment research pursues a holistic approach to studying cognition but it does so often without providing an epistemological foundation for the harmonization of the various levels of description. Ernst Cassirer, who recognized the growing conflict of various modes of knowing, provided such an account. This article aims to bring Cassirer’s philosophy into a fruitful dialogue with embodied philosophy of mind in order to present a view on selfhood which affirms our everyday intuitions.