Lisa Doerksen

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Knowledge in Crisis project, based in the Department of Philosophy at the Central European University (Vienna). Before joining the CEU, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, where I received my PhD in Philosophy in 2023.
My research explores the relationship between the first-person perspective and objectivity. My PhD thesis, Finding Oneself in the World (2023), advances a new way of thinking about this relationship. I argue that there is a distinctive gap between the subject’s first-person perspective and any objective or third-personal account of the subject. This gap is experienced as a limitation on one’s ability to see how any given object could have this very perspective on the world (i.e., the perspective one takes to be one’s own).
This gap imposes limits on objective modes of inquiry directed at conscious subjects. I am currently working on the implications of this gap for foundational problems in philosophy of mind and epistemology, such as problems about consciousness and external world scepticism.