“Senses of Self” Conference
CFUL, University of Lisbon
School of Arts and Humanities
Library Building, Room B112C
11-14 March, 2026
How do you know who you really are? What even is the ‘real’ you? This conference aims to bring together scholars working on this issue, as well as related questions, including, but not limited to: is it just the self–all of you–or is there reason to think that within the self, there is a ‘real,’ ‘deeper,’ or ‘true’ self? Are all actions expressive of the real self? Is having a self related to being a person and/or having moral status?
Answers to these questions are given from different perspectives, literatures, and even disciplines in terms of constructs including (but again not limited to) character, the ‘deep’, ‘real’, or ‘true’, self, personal identity, and personality. Uniquely, this conference will focus on the relationship between these various questions, and the constructs we use to answer them. When we ask these various questions, and use these various constructs, are we talking about the same ‘self’? Accordingly, the conference welcomes scholars working on these issues across literatures and traditions in philosophy and related fields (e.g., psychology, anthropology).
Keynote speakers:
Invited speakers:
Main Schedule
11 March
12:00 Registration and catering (Letras Library Foyer)
1:00 Opening Remarks: Jeremy Pober (Conference Organizer) and Ricardo Santos (Chair of CFUL)
1:30 Krisztina Orban (Tübingen): “Self-Referring as Self-Directed Action”
2:30 Lunch
4:00 Jeremy Pober (Lisboa) “The Deep Self as Explanatory of the Superficial Self”
5:00 Coffee Break (Letras Library Foyer)
5:30 Hong-Yu Wong (Tübingen): “The Self and the Sense of Embodiment”
6:30 Quill Kukla (Georgetown/Hannover): “Centering Gender Euphoria”
12 March
10:00 Victor Verdejo (Pompeu Fabra): “Polysemy and the Senses of Self”
11:00 Sidney Carls-Diamante (Santiago da Compostela) “Bipolar Disorder and the Self”
12:00 Coffee Break (Letras Library Foyer)
12:30 Contributed Sessions
2:30 Lunch
4:00 Rowan Bell (Guelph): “Changing One’s Story: Narrative Identity and Retconning”
5:00 Coffee Break (Letras Library Foyer)
5:30 Joshua Knobe (Yale): “What the Self is Really All About”
7:00 Head to dinner!
8:30 Dinner at Lucimar Gemini Restaurant
13 March
10:00 Matilda Carter (Leeds): “Authenticity and the Ever-Changing Self” [online]
11:00 Anna Bortolan (Swansea): “Emotional Labour and Self-Identity” [online]
12:00 Coffee Break (Letras Library Foyer)
12:30 Contributed Sessions
2:30 Lunch
4:00 Justin White (Brigham Young): “The Interweaving Selves of Merleau-Ponty”
5:00 Coffee Break (Letras Library Foyer)
5:30 Elizabeth Schechter (Maryland) “Two Candidate Cases of Multiple Mindedness”
14 March
2:00 Roundtable Discussion
3:30 Closing Remarks
4:00 Reception (Location TBD)
Contributed Sessions
12 March
Group: Mind And Psychiatry (Letras Library B112C)
12:30 Anna Golova (Oxford) “Self-Illness Ambiguity without a Self-Illness Distinction”
1:10 Stephen Gadsby (Antwerp) “Self-identity in anorexia nervosa”
1:50 Rebeca Rowson (Oxford) “Authentic Expression”
Group: Metaphysics and Language (Letras Library B112B)
12:30 Heidi Haanila (Turku) “Real Self and the Pattern Theory of Self”
1:10 Andrea Visintini (SNS Pisa) “The Five-Dimensional Ego”
1:50 Mathijs Geurts (Salzburg) “Self-Address”
13 March
Group: Continental Philosophy (Letras Library B112C)
12:30 Jeroen Hoffbauer (Antwerp) “When am I truly Myself? Jaeggi and the problem of interpretive authority”
1:10 Albert Yoo (Independent Scholar) “The Oneiric Body and Prolonged Retention: On Selfhood, Affect, and Agency in Dreaming”
Group: Epistemology (Letras Library B112B)
12:30 Oyku Ulusoy (Lund) “Describing Change in Self Through Choice Deliberations”
1:10 Lumeng Liu (Warwick) “Knowing Myself as an ‘I’ of the ‘We’”
1:50 Diana Craciun (UCL) “On Using AI to Know Ourselves”
Registration for the “Senses of Self” Conference is available here.
Registration fees include catered coffee breaks. Please note that participants are responsible for their own meals. Additional registration is available for the conference dinner, which will cost approximately 25€.
Local info is available here.
Organiser: Jeremy Pober (LanCog, University of Lisbon)
This event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa.