Department Member, Philosophy
Thesis Title: Normality, Identity and Normative Frameworks
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Thomas Gil
Vincent Geoghegan |
About
Lutz a Marie Curie doctoral Student participating in the project "Enlightenment and Global History". He is located at Queen's University of Belfast.
In this doctoral thesis the concept of the self and its relations to (scientific, historical and normative) knowledge is scrutinized. Drawing on recent debates gravitating around narrative accounts of the self my aim is to contribute to an improved understanding on how to critically analyze not only the constitutive contexts but also the very relation between contexts, normative frameworks and the resulting (cultural, active, etc) identity or “self”.
For that purpose the arguments of proponents of the narrative self will be reconstructed as well as those of authors opposing narrativity. Although both sides agree on the insight that the self is not a positively given, ontological independent entity, views on the conditions of the process of self-constitution vary substantially. The spectrum reaches from hermeneutically strong claims concerning the narrative unity of the self to the forthright denial of coherence of any theory of the self relying on narrativity. The basis of the reconstruction is built by three questions: What role could narratives have in the dynamic constitution of the self? What are (conceptual, social and other) limitations to giving a narrative account of the self? Do narratives clarify or obstruct the interrelations of description and evaluation in the course self-constitution?
Publications:
Lutz Fricke and Suparna Choudhury (2011). Neuropolitik und plastische Gehirne. Eine Fallstudie des adoleszenten Gehirns. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie: Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 391-402. doi: 10.1524/dzph.2011.0032
Lutz Fricke: Norms and Normalization – On the Possibility of False Recognition, in: New Perspectives on Global History, Wehrhahn 2012 (forthcoming)
