Matthew Boyle is Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. He works on topics in the philosophy of mind, especially self-knowledge, the nature of rationality, and some questions about the role of rationality in perception and action. He also writes on topics in the history of philosophy, with a particular focus on the works of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Prof. Matthew Boyle
Senior Fellow
Period at the center: January - July 2026
Research Project: Another Self: Studies in Intersubjectivity
Email: mbboyle@uchicago.edu
WebsiteResearch Project
Another Self: Studies in Intersubjectivity
I am writing a book on the basis and philosophical significance of our human capacity to understand and interact with other minded beings like ourselves. The topic engages with the classical “problem of other minds” but also with relevant work in empirical psychology, with phenomenological work on the structure and significance of intersubjective consciousness, and with work in the German Idealist tradition on the necessary link between self-consciousness and mutual recognition. A central aim is to make sense of Sartre’s “Ontological Thesis” about intersubjective consciousness: that “my relation to the Other is, first and fundamentally, a relation of being to being, and not of knowledge to knowledge.”
Selected publications
Monograph
Transparency and Reflection. A Study of Self-Knowledge and the Nature of Mind (New York: Oxford, 2024).
Article
“Anger, Intentionality, and the View from Within: Sartrean Reflections”. In Analytical Existentialism, ed. Berislav Marusic and Mark Schroeder (New York: Oxford, 2024).
“Ethics and the First Person Perspective.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 123:3 (2023), 253-274.
“Self-Consciousness, Transparency, and Reflection.” 2023. Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 130:2 (2023), 110-129.