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In the interest of articulating a materialist theory of self in which self and brain are "correlates' in the broad sense that they form part of a meaningful, integrated whole, I take the case of phantom limb syndrome. When considered in a philosophical light, such phenomena might seem to imply the necessity of the first-person perspective, a key insight of the phenomenological tradition, in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular. But it is possible to formulate a ">materialist response to this first-person challenge. For this response to be effective, it will have to take integrate a notion of embodiment. However, in order to not to reinvest brain or body with the mysterious character that the materialist approach has stripped from the "first person", the vision of the brain here must also be an embedded vision, as Andy Clark calls it, that is, locating brain not just in an embodied context but also in the social world, in the network of symbolic relations (what I call, following Lev Vygotsky, the 'social brain"). A self which is the product of the brain, a brain which is intentional and embodied, and both as correlates of a materialist theory of self: this is what I attempt to sketch out, taking as a particular case, phantom limb syndrome.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24820-2_8

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