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This month researcher from Vilnius University, Vilius Dranseika, will give a series of lectures at the Department of Humanties as part of the Erasmus+ exchange programme .

The title of the lecture series – Personal ldentity in Neuroethics, Experimental Philosophy and Cognitive Science. The focus of the lectures – exploration of problems of personal identity and their transformation into disciplines such as Neuroethics, Experimental Philosophy, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science of Religion, Behavioural Economics and Cognitive Anthropology. 

Monday, 22 October (Room: B-510)

  • 14:00 – Three ways to study personal identity judgments
  • 15:45 – The moral self hypothesis

Wednesday, 24 October (Room: B-511)

  • 15:00 – On the ambiguity of the same person
Lectures will be held in English.

Summary of lectures:

Lecture series: Personal Identity in Neuroethics, Experimental Philosophy and Cognitive Science
In this set of three lectures, I explore how the traditional philosophical problem of personal identity (What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another as the same person?) is being addressed and transformed in recent years in a number of empirical disciplines: Neuroethics, Experimental Philosophy, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science of Religion, Behavioral Economics, and Cognitive Anthropology.

Lecture 1. Three ways to study personal identity judgments
(Monday, 22.10., 14:00, B-510)
In the first lecture, I explore empirical research strategies that are currently used by experimental philosophers and cognitive scientists studying personal identity. The work surveyed covers empirical explorations of reactions to classical philosophical thought experiments on personal identity, work in Cognitive Psychology on ‘true self’, ‘essential moral self’, and ‘deep self’, work in Cognitive Science of Religion on reincarnation and afterlife beliefs, work in Behavioral Economics on ‘future self-continuity’, work in Experimental Philosophy and Neuroethics on ‘Phineas Gage effect’ etc.

Lecture 2. The moral self hypothesis
(Monday, 22.10., 15:45, B-510)
In the second lecture, I focus on one of the most influential and most widely cited recent ideas in the field: the moral self hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that moral traits are central to ordinary beliefs about what makes someone qualify as the same person as they advance through life. I discuss the moral self hypothesis as it is explored in recent research on perceptions of and attitudes toward, among other phenomena, addiction, neurodegenerative conditions, and prison sentences.

Lecture 3. On the ambiguity of “the same person”
(Wednesday, 24.10., 15:00, B-511)
In the last lecture in the present series, I address the ambiguity between different senses of identity inherent in the English language phrase “still / no longer the same person”. I argue that much of the surveyed literature in Psychology and Experimental Philosophy (but not so much in Neuroethics, where qualitative interviews and clinical case descriptions provide much richer and more nuanced picture of the phenomena in question) – including much of the literature on the moral self hypothesis – suffers from failure to clearly distinguish between numerical and qualitative readings of identity. I explore ways to address this ambiguity by various empirical strategies, including running studies in languages that lexicalize the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity as well as using new scales based on the Lockean idea of personal identity as a ‘forensic concept’.

About the lecturer:

V. Dranseika is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University, author of numerous internationally-recognised publications. His research interests include empirical research into a person's identity, causality, and perceptions of choice and freedeom, as well as transcultural studies on a sense of morality. More information about V. Dranseika - www.dranseika.lt.

Location

Room
B-510, B-511
Date: