Our Centre for Intellectual History member Vili Lähteenmäki has obtained a prestigious Academy of Finland Research Fellowship. The position will enable him to research the “Constitution of the Self in the Cartesian and Lockean Traditions” from September 2017 to end of August 2022.
The project produces a reassessment of the Cartesian and Lockean conceptions of self. I aim to show how in both traditions we can discover and explicate a set of relations between a core self and psychological and bodily aspects that enter into the constitution of a moral agent. I intend to rectify the received view, according to which Descartes advocates a substantial and Locke a psychological account of selfhood, both of which effectively interiorize the self. By offering a historically and systematically accurate interpretation of metaphysical, psychological, and bodily aspects as proper constituents of a self my project aims to change our conception of the birth of the modern subject in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions (from the Academy’s website).
Many congratulations to Vili!!!!