Lisa Doerksen

She is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Knowledge in Crisis project in the Department of Philosophy at Central European University in Vienna. Before joining CEU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, where she received her PhD in Philosophy in 2023.

Her research explores the relationship between the first-person perspective and objectivity. Her PhD thesis, Finding Oneself in the World (2023), advances a new way of thinking about this relationship. She argues 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—that is, the perspective one takes to be one’s own.

This gap imposes limits on objective modes of inquiry directed at conscious subjects. She is currently working on the implications of this gap for foundational problems in philosophy of mind and epistemology, such as problems concerning consciousness and external world skepticism.