Felipe León

Short presentation

My background is in classical phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and I mainly work on issues in the fields of social cognition and collective intentionality. I also have interests in the philosophy of emotions, and in the nature of selfhood and reflection. I came to Copenhagen in 2011 for my MA studies in philosophy. I have worked as a PhD fellow (2013-2016), and as a postdoc at the Center for Subjectivity Research. My current postdoc project, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, is part of the larger project "You and We: Second-Person Engagement and Collective Intentionality", directed by Dan Zahavi. 

Current research

My current research aims at bringing together theoretical and empirical perspectives on two research domains that have been intensively explored in recent years, though in relative isolation from each other. 

On the one hand, an increasing number of philosophers, psychologist and social neuroscientists have investigated the significance of second-person engagements in how we understand other people. Although there is a broad consensus that there is something distinctive about relating to someone as a you, it has proven challenging to pinpoint what precisely this distinctiveness amounts to. It has been proposed that a second-person relation involves action (instead of passive observation), affective engagement, reciprocity, communication, and/or a specific form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, some strands of research on group-identification and collective intentionality have investigated the relationship between individual or I-intentionality, and collective or we-intentionality, understood as the capacity to share mental states with other people (including intentions, beliefs, and emotions), and thereby adopt with them a group- or we-perspective. 

Although the topics of second-person engagement and group-identification point to pivotal structures of human sociality, their interrelations remain largely unexplored. Some of the questions I am interested in are: (i) Do second-person engagements play any role in how people come to identify with groups, and thereby adopt with others a we-perspective? (ii) How, if at all, are second-person engagements and group-identification modulated by the spatio-temporal proximity of the participants in a social interaction, and by the number of them (in dyadic, triadic, and larger-scale interactions) (iii) What is the developmental route of second-person engagements and group-identification? (iii) Does triadic joint attention amount to a basic form of we-perspective?

Teaching

• Spring 2019: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology: Embodiment, Perception, and the Social Life (with Søren Overgaard)

• Fall 2018: Empathy and Interpersonal Understanding (with Patricia Meindl)

• Spring 2017: Consciousness and Self-consciousness (with Dan Zahavi)

• Fall 2016: Central Topics in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind
  

• Fall 2014: Central Topics in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (with Adrian Alsmith and Alessandro Salice)

• Spring 2014: Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (with Søren Overgaard and Mads Gram Henriksen)