2022

Heinämaa, Sara

European philosophy is often criticized as an outdated form of thinking and characterized as individualistic, anthropocentric and Euro-centric. What is common to many such critical approaches is the notion that the main source of problems lies in an inherited Cartesian understanding of selfhood. In this paper, I confront this anti-Cartesian critique of European philosophy by arguing that Husserlian phenomenology offers a robust and viable reinterpretation of the Cartesian self, and a reinterpretation that avoids the Kantian impasses of formalism and intellectualism. I follow Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses and show that the self that constitutes the sense of the world is not a mere form of representations nor a solus ipse. Rather than being a static form or a solitary agent, the sense-constituting self is a dynamic formation with an internal structure and generative relations to other similar selves.