SG - Situating Subjectivity
In short
Lecture- 26 May 2026
- 20.00h
- Impulse Wageningen Campus
- Ludger van Dijk (WUR)
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
We look into the eyes of a dog and imagine we know what the dog feels and how he or she shows it. The dog feels close to us: we live together, we sleep together, take long walks, and it is also a mammal, like us. The bat is a mammal too, but maybe the one that differs the most from our way of being in the world. At the same time we seem intrigued by this difference in how they orient themselves in the dark, their wings between the fingers, upside down sleeping and often matriarchal social structures.
In this series we try to get closer to the bat looking at how we capture them in our cultures, in our knowledge and in our art. And we look back on the famous article of Thomas Nagel ‘What is it like to be a bat?’.
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Situating Subjectivity
Thomas Nagel published his famous article “What is it like to be a bat?” more than fifty years ago, starting a debate that has been with us ever since. In the preface of the re-publication in 2024 Nagel writes that his essay was meant as a contribution to the mind-body problem in that the bat’s subjectivity challenges attempts to reduce mental life to physical states. This problem for reductionism that he raised has not gone away. Yet Nagel’s argument is sometimes overshadowed by reading his publication as casting doubt on the very possibility of knowing about the experience of non-human animals. Tonight philosopher Ludger van Dijk will situate Nagel’s work in the history of the mind-body problem. Taking Nagel’s challenge to reductionism seriously, while avoiding skepticism about non-human subjectivity, he will then introduce more contemporary theories and methods. Can these recent approaches to cognition be understood as steps towards Nagel’s vision of a more open-minded approach to the study of human and non-human consciousness alike?
Speaker
You can find more information about tonight's speaker on her profile.
Date
20:00 - 22:00