Università Roma Tre

The course explores the issues of the construction and defence of personal identity. After starting from the theories to which all philosophical and psychological reflection on personal identity continues to refer, namely those of John Locke and William James, the course discusses in an integrative perspective Chomsky-inspired developmental psychology, Jean Piaget's constructivism, Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective of development and John Bowlby's attachment theory. Following this theoretical and methodological pathway, the course draws on data from the psychological sciences to reconstruct the trajectory that from the birth of self-consciousness linked to the body and emotions passes through the enrichment of the internal world, to arrive at the constitution of an ego placed in time and rationalised as an autobiography. This ego, however, is not a stable possession: it is rather something perpetually precarious, for the defence of which the individual continually mobilises all his resources.

A. Kind, Persons and Personal Identity, Wiley, New York 2015.
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1991.
M. Marraffa and C. Meini, The developmental psychology of personal identity. A philosophical perspective. Bloomsbury, London 2023.

The course provides an overview to the debate on the use of neuroscientific (and in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging) data to reform the ontology of the mental. The first part offers a historical introduction to debates on the metaphysics of the mental in philosophy of mind, in the foundations of experimental psychology and in the (proto-)history of cognitive neuroscience. A second part offers a historical-epistemological introduction to cognitive neuroscience, with a special emphasis on the uses (and abuses) of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Building on these introductory themes, the issue of the uncertainty of psychological categories (the cognitive ontology) and how neuroscience can enable them to be revised will be addressed. This will be addressed in the third and most substantial part of the course, in which different approaches to reforming cognitive ontology will be examined. In the fourth and utmost part of the course, some case studies will be examined, such as the neural correlates of basic emotions or the Fusiform Facial Area.

For attendees: the following papers:
* Viola, M. (2017). Carving mind at brain’s joints. The debate on cognitive ontology. Phenomenology and Mind, (12), 162-172.
* Viola, M. (2021). Beyond the Platonic Brain: facing the challenge of individual differences in function-structure mapping. Synthese, 199(1-2), 2129-2155.
* Poldrack, R. A. (2010). Mapping mental function to brain structure: how can cognitive neuroimaging succeed?. Perspectives on psychological science, 5(6), 753-761.
* McCaffrey, J. B. (2023). Evolving Concepts of Functional Localization. Philosophy Compass, e12914.
* (other papers communicated during the lessons)

For non-attendees: above papers + 2 books between 2, 3 and/or 4-- please send an email to the professor.
2) Michael Anderson (2014). After Phrenology. Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. MIT Press.
3) Muhammad Ali Khalidi (2023). Cognitive Ontology. Cambridge University Press.
4) Luiz Pessoa (2022). The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. The MIT Press.