Looking for the I in the Space of Reasons: John McDowell on Personal Identity and Selfhood

Abstract

This paper examines John McDowell’s notion of subjectivity (selfhood) to assess its theoretical potential for a deeper engagement with the phenomenological approach. Through a reconstruction of his theses on personal identity and situated, embodied subjectivity within the space of reasons, it shows how McDowell offers an effective response to reductionist or dualist accounts of the subject-world relation. He presents selfhood as an irreducible element for justifying the psychological continuity of mental states, one that thoroughly informs intentional relations with the surrounding environment, both pre-reflectively and reflectively. However, to fully exploit McDowell’s perspective in dialogue with phenomenology, it is necessary to ask whether the promising outlook of naturalizing the space of reasons can emancipate itself from the McDowellian thesis that epistemically relevant content must necessarily possess conceptual form.