Thomas Metzinger
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Thomas Metzinger
Thomas Metzinger (born
March 12,
1958) is a
German philosopher. He currently holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the
Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. He has been active since the early 1990s in the promotion of
consciousness studies as an academic endeavour. As a co-founder, he has been particularly active in the organization of the
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), and sat on the board of directors of that organisation from 1994 to 2007. Metzinger is director of the
MIND group and has been president of the
German cognitive science society from 2005 to 2007. In English he has published two edited works,
Conscious Experience (1995), and
Neural correlates of consciousness: empirical and conceptual issues (2000). The latter book arose out of the second ASSC meeting, for which he acted as local organizer.In 2003 he published the monograph
Being No One. In this book he argues that no such things as
selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are
phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. He argues that the phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model."Metzinger is praised for his grasp of the fundamental issues of neurobiology, consciousness and the relationship of
mind and body. However, his views about the self are the subject of considerable controversy and
ongoing debates.His interests include:
- Philosophy of mind (esp. philosophical aspects of empirical theories in the neuro- and cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and related areas of research).
- Ethics (esp. conceptual connections between applied ethics, the philosophy of mind and anthropology)
In the new field of
neuroethics Thomas Metzinger is engaged by supervising the
neuroethics web portal.
External links
Thomas MetzingerThomas Metzinger
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