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Jakob von Uexküll’s Concept of Umwelt as an Account of the Mental

Feiten, Tim Elmo
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-2335
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1721639823403126

Abstract Details

2024, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: Philosophy.
Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) was a German-speaking biologist who emphasized that animals are not just complex machines but living subjects who each experience a world of their own. Uexküll called these worlds Umwelten, and this concept lies at the heart of a broad and positive reception of Uexküll’s thought in French and German philosophy of the 20th century, and more recently in the philosophy of embodied cognitive science. Despite their diverse philosophical views, these readers of Uexküll all disagree with him on one crucial point: They deny Uexküll’s claim that each individual human lives in their own private, closed Umwelt. I show that Uexküll uses the term Umwelt in two distinct senses: The phenomenal Umwelt, or p-Umwelt, describes the world given in subjective experience from the first-person perspective, while the ethological Umwelt, or e-Umwelt, describes the world of the animal as observed and described by an external observer from the third-person perspective. This distinction allows me to give a more precise account of the positions in the debate about open or closed Umwelten. Whether an e-Umwelt is described as open or closed is a methodological choice depending on one’s explanatory project. In contrast, p-Umwelten are closed if subjective experience is always fundamentally private and open if it is not. Based on this distinction I argue that Umwelt cannot bridge the gap between ‘objectivist’ ecological psychology and ‘subjectivist’ enactivism, since this gap also separates e-Umwelt from p-Umwelt. On the question about the metaphysics of subjective experience, I discuss an enactive account of intersubjectivity that involves the sharing of experience in a strong sense and argue that an alternative account of intersubjectivity without strong sharing is both possible and preferable under some criteria for theory choice.
Anthony Chemero, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Angela Potochnik, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Zvi Biener, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
168 p.
Philosophy
Umwelt; Jakob von Uexkull; embodied cognition

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Feiten, T. E. (2024). Jakob von Uexküll’s Concept of Umwelt as an Account of the Mental [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1721639823403126

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Feiten, Tim Elmo. Jakob von Uexküll’s Concept of Umwelt as an Account of the Mental. 2024. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1721639823403126.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Feiten, Tim Elmo. "Jakob von Uexküll’s Concept of Umwelt as an Account of the Mental." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2024. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1721639823403126

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1721639823403126
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© 2024, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.
Release 3.2.12