Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Bodily experiences typically are mental states suitable to ground judgments that are de se in that subjects endowed with a conceptual system or language would express them by qualifying the felt body with a first-person indexical. Authors in the literature often express this by saying that subjects have a “sense of bodily ownership” (SBO) for the body they feel in bodily experiences. This paper revolves around the SBO. To start with, I state the three goals that any view on this phenomenon should meet. I then proceed to presenting an account of it. On this account, for a subject to have a SBO is for her to be aware of (i) the constitutive relation holding between the properties she experiences as instantiated in the felt body and the experiences of which these properties are a content; and (ii) the relevant experiences (namely bodily experiences) as being her own. A fairly uncontroversial reading of (ii) will be assumed. The central goal of the paper will be to make sense of and defend (i) by putting forward the notion of “bodily field”. I will underpin the resulting view by arguing that it meets the three goals defined.