03/11/2025
שמחים לארח את פרופ' דוד קובץ', במסגרת המפגש הראשון של הסמינר החוגי שלנו בתשפ"ו. הפרטים המלאים כאן:
מרצה: דוד קובץ' (אוניברסיטת תל אביב)
מתי: יום שלישי, ה-4.11.25, ב-12:15
איפה: חדר 1919, קומה 19 במגדל אשכול
Speaker: David Kovacs (Tel-Aviv University)
Tite: Self-making makes it
Abstract: What are we? A historically popular view is that we are souls; most contemporary personal identity theorists believe that we are essentially psychological, but material, entities; and yet others think that we are biological organisms. In past work (Kovacs 2016, 2020, 2022), I defended a kind of private conventionalism about what we are, which I called the "Self-making view": we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our 'I'-beliefs. The Self-making view has many attractive features: it is methodologically deflationary, it offers an elegant treatment of puzzles about persons and their large, intrinsically person-like "thinking parts", and it is also independently motivated by considerations about constitutive rationality and indexical thought. However, lately the Self-making view has come under fire. Olson (forthcoming) contends that properly understood, it is not a conventionalist view at all. Others argue that the view is unmotivated: the arguments I wheeled in in its favor at best support a kind of garden-variety social conventionalist view (Longenecker 2022) or no kind of conventionalism at all (Madden 2024). Finally, Duncan (forthcoming) makes the case that the view leads to rampant indeterminacy about who we are, reducing the idea of self-making to absurdity. In this talk, I will attempt to address these criticisms, which also give me a chance to further clarify and refine the Self-making View.
The talk will be delivered in English.