Research project funded by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, 2016-2019
The project The First Person examined contemporary accounts of the first-person perspective and the purportedly special epistemic status of I-thoughts. These are thoughts by which we ascribe to ourselves mental states, such as our beliefs, desires, and feelings, and which we can typically express in I-statement, such as “I believe that it rains”, “I want to have some ice-cream”, and “I am happy”.
As part of this project, I co-organized four interdisciplinary workshops on these topics with leading experts in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics, and supervised a doctoral dissertation. Together with Wolfgang Freitag, I developed an expressivist reading of one of the most famous I-statements in the history of philosophy: Kant’s “I think”, which must be able to accompany all my representations.
The project received generous funding from the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung (2016–2019).
Key publication:
An expressivist interpretation of Kant’s “I think” (Wolfgang Freitag, Katharina Kraus). Noûs (2020).
DOI:
doi.org/10.1111/nous.12350
University of Freiburg:
www.ucf.uni-freiburg.de/people/chair-in-epistemology-and-theory-of-science/ets-archive/research