- Avicenna and the Flying Man argument
- The spring of the argument: "What you deny about yourself is necessarily different from what you affirm about yourself"
- "Know thyself
- Augustine's principle: The soul cannot think what it is as it thinks what it is not
- Against Aristotle: The soul does not know itself by an imaginary fiction, as it knows other things in their absence, but by a knowledge based on an "inner presence, unsimulated and true"
- Self-knowledge according to Guillaume d'Auvergne: incorporality (spirituality) and unisimplicity of the soul
- The "unifying self" and knowledge "in presence": Guillaume d'Auvergne and Descartes
- The introduction of the subject in Augustinian psychology: the "spiritual subject
- From self-knowledge to knowledge of the other: Olivi
- A reminder of Strawson's thesis on the person. Every person is a subject of self- and hetero-attributions, capable of recognizing other beings as subjects of self- and hetero-attributions, and of being recognized by them as subjects of self- and hetero-attributions
- The Strawsonian "person" and the Cartesian "ego
- The medieval problem of "Tobias's Angel": external observation is not enough to access the other as other
- Olivi's solution: the "conspiracy" theory
- The Stoic source: sumpnoia (conspiracy) and sympatheia (sympathy)
- Recognition of others is an immediate, natural inference, which begins with a feeling,inspiratio, the feeling of self, and ends with a feeling, a "quasi-sensation" of parity, the feeling of another self, "by means of a powerful conspiratio "
- The feeling of my own spirit, of my own breath, of myself as a living being, is at the same time that of a community of spirit or breath.
10:30 - 11:30
Lecture
Inventio subiecti. The invention of the modern subject (11)
Alain de Libera
10:30 - 11:30