PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Arts and Sciences: Philosophy

Jakob von Uexkull (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. Uexkull called these worlds Umwelten, and this concept lies at the heart of a broad and positive reception of Uexkull'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 Uexkull all disagree with him on one crucial point: They deny Uexkull's claim that each individual human lives in their own private, closed Umwelt. I show that Uexkull 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.

Committee: Anthony Chemero Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Angela Potochnik Ph.D. (Committee Member); Zvi Biener Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy