I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, (...) any conscious process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I characterize a minimal form of self-consciousness, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. It is a constant structural feature of conscious experience, and corresponds to the consciousness of the self-as-subject that is not taken as an intentional object. In the second part, I argue that contemporary cognitive neuroscience has by and large missed this fundamental form of self-consciousness in its investigation of various forms of self-experience. In the third part, I (...) exemplify how the notion of pre-reflective self-awareness can be of relevance for empirical research. In particular, I propose to interpret processes of sensorimotor integration in light of the phenomenological approach that allows the definition of pre-reflective self-consciousness. (shrink)

Empirical and experiential investigations allow the distinction between observational and non-observational forms of subjective bodily experiences. From a first-person perspective, the biological body can be (1) an "opaque body" taken as an intentional object of observational consciousness, (2) a "performative body" pre-reflectively experienced as a subject/agent, (3) a "transparent body" pre-reflectively experienced as the bodily mode of givenness of objects in the external world, or (4) an "invisible body" absent from experience. It is proposed that pre-reflective bodily experiences rely (...) on sensori-motor integrative mechanisms that process information on the external world in a self relative way. These processes are identification-free in that the self is not identified as an object of observation. Moreover, it is defended that observational self-consciousness must be grounded on such identification-free processes and pre-reflective forms of bodily experience. (shrink)

How do we feel our body in emotion experience? In this paper I initially distinguish between foreground and background bodily feelings, and characterize them in some detail. Then I compare this distinction with the one between reflective and pre-reflective bodily self-awareness one finds in some recent philosophical phenomenological works, and conclude that both foreground and background bodily feelings can be understood as pre-reflective modes of bodily self-awareness that nevertheless differ in degree of self-presentation or (...) self-intimation. Finally, I use the distinction between foreground and background bodily feelings to characterize the experience of being absorbed in an activity, as opposed to accounts that imply that absorption involves bodily inconspicuousness. (shrink)

I. The Paradox of “Judgment” and Pre-reflective Self-AwarenessIn “Fichte’s Original Insight” (1982), Dieter Henrich, the founder of the Heidelberg School, delivered a diagnosis of why three hundred years of Western explication of the internal structure of subjectivity proved to be fruitless. As Manfred Frank noted, “Seldom has so much food for thought been put in a nutshell.”1 Fichte had the “insight” that his predecessors, in their totality (and “nearly all his successors”2), including Kant, misconceived the reality of our (...) self-consciousness as reflection, and thus fell prey to circular reasoning. A subject’s reflection on its own identity is impossible, since it can gain awareness of this identity only if it previously possessed some immediate knowledge of itself. Therefore, (self-)consciousness should not be conceived within the framework of the “reflection model,” which possesses an inherent contradiction, but rather as pre-reflective in nature, and as such it must be postulated by our thought. This is not to say that reflective consciousness—“egological” consciousness, the “reflection model of consciousness,” the “higher-order” theory of consciousness—i.e., the cogito, is impossible, but merely to highlight that its logical foundation cannot be justified by itself and that it essentially depends on the pre-reflective sphere of our psychic lives.3. (shrink)

If one looks at the current discussion of self-awareness there seems to be a general agreement that whatever valuable philosophical contributions Husserl might have made, his account of self-awareness is not among them. This prevalent appraisal is often based on the claim that Husserl was too occupied with the problem of intentionality to ever really pay attention to the issue of self-awareness. Due to his interest in intentionality Husserl took object-consciousness as the paradigm of every kind of (...) awareness and therefore settled with a model of self-awareness based upon the subject-object dichotomy, with its entailed difference between the intending and the intended. As a consequence, Husserl never discovered the existence of pre-reflective self- awareness, but remained stuck in the traditional, but highly problematic reflection model of self-awareness. (shrink)

We argue that the projective geometrical component of the Projective Consciousness Model can account for key aspects of pre-reflective self-consciousness and can relate PRSC intelligibly to another signal feature of subjectivity: perspectival character or point of view. We illustrate how the projective geometrical versions of the concepts of duality, reciprocity, polarity, closedness, closure, and unboundedness answer to salient aspects of the phenomenology of PRSC. We thus show that the same mathematics that accounts for the statics and dynamics of (...) perspectival character also accounts for PRSC. More generally, we argue that introducing higher-level geometrical concepts into the theory of PRSC, and into the theory of consciousness broadly, as the PCM does, promises to break longstanding theoretical impasses and dialectical stalemates. (shrink)

Disorders of the self figure prominently in psychotic experiences. Subjects de­scribe that “alien” thoughts are inserted in their mind by foreign powers, can sometimes hear their thoughts aloud or describe complex voices interacting with each other. Such experiences can be conceptualized in the framework of a Philosophical Anthropology, which suggests that human experience is characterized by centric and excentric positionality: subjects experience their environment centered around their enlived body and at the same time can reflect upon their place in (...) a shared lifeworld from an excentric point of view. Pre-reflective self awareness has been suggested to ensure that subjects can identify their own thoughts or actions as belonging to themselves, even when they reflect upon them from an excentric point of view. This pre-reflective self awareness appears to be impaired during psychotic experiences, when subjects no longer identify thoughts in their own stream of consciousness as belonging to themselves and instead attribute them to an outside agent. Among several potential causes, it is suggested that such impairments can be due to discrimi­natory or traumatic experiences, which affect the enlived (centric) position of a person and make her feel encircled and deeply threatened by aversive powers. As a consequence, the afflicted individual may fundamentally distance herself from her current centric position in a hostile environment, at the price of experiencing her own thoughts or actions as alien. Philosophical Anthropology may thus help to explain how social exclusion, discrimination and traumatization can promote psychotic experiences and why social support is of primary importance for any treatment of psychosis. (shrink)

Most philosophers in the phenomenological tradition hold that in addition to the explicit self-consciousness we might get in reflection, there is also a pre-reflective self-consciousness. Despite its popularity, it can be a little difficult to get a grasp on this notion. It can seem impossibly thin—such that it really amounts to little more than a restatement of the notion of consciousness—or problematically robust—such that it seems to conflict with the apparent transparency of consciousness. This paper argues for (...) a notion of pre-reflective self consciousness that avoids these extremes. It is argued that though pre-reflective self-consciousness exists and is an important part of conscious ex­perience, it is not an intrinsic feature of first-order consciousness. Instead, it is constituted by an agent’s background awareness of her ability to reflect and thereby self-ascribe her experiences. (shrink)

In the 1960s, a school formed in Heidelberg around Dieter Henrich that criticized—with reference to J. G. Fichte—the ‘reflection model’ of self-consciousness according to which self-consciousness consists in a representational relation between two mental states or the self-representation of a mental state. I present a new “Heidelberg perspective” of pre-reflective self-consciousness. According to this new approach, self-consciousness occurs in two varieties which regularly are not sufficiently distinguished: The first variety is egological self-consciousness that (...) exists in connection with the use of concepts. It consists in the consciousness of having an awareness of oneself as the Ego of a conscious state. The second variety is anonymous pre-reflective self-consciousness, which is awareness of consciousness but does not contain egological information. The pre-reflective self-consciousness does not exhibit a subject-object structure and thus cannot be appropriately determined as a representation, self-representation, or even acquaintance relation. Rather, anonymous self-consciousness is characterized by an indistinction of subject and object. However, pre-reflective self-consciousness is the basis of egological self-consciousness. (shrink)

Kant points to two forms of self-consciousness: the inner sense (empirical apperception) grounded in a sensory form of self-awareness and transcendental apperception. The aim of this paper is to show that a sophisticated notion of basic self-consciousness, which contains a pre-reflective self-consciousness as its first level, is provided by the notion of transcendental apperception. The necessity for a pre-reflective self-consciousness has been pointed out in phenomenological literature. According to this account, every self-ascription (...) of any property implies a more fundamental form of self-consciousness, i.e., a kind of immediate familiarity with oneself. This pre-reflective self-consciousness is a non-relational and non-identificational form of self-consciousness and concerns an immediate acquaintance of the subject with itself. In the specific terms of transcendentalism every thought contains an implicit reference to a first-personal “givenness” or a sense of “mineness” that articulates a non-relational and non-identificational form of a pre-reflective model of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Rowlands offers a de-intellectualised account of personhood that is meant to secure the unity of a mental life. I argue that his characterisation also singles out a morally relevant feature of individuals. Along the same lines that the orthodox understanding of personhood reflects a fundamental precondition for moral agency, Rowlands’s notion provides a fundamental precondition for moral patienthood.

It is often held that to have a conscious experience presupposes having some form of implicit self-awareness. The most dominant phenomenological view usually claims that we essentially perceive experiences as our own. This is the so called “mineness” character, or dimension of experience. According to this view, mineness is not only essential to conscious experience, it also grounds the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. In this paper, we show that there are reasons to (...) doubt this constituting role of mineness. We argue that there are alternative possibilities and that the necessity for an adequate theory of the self within psychopathology gives us good reasons to believe that we need a thicker notion of the pre-reflective self. To this end, we develop such a notion: the Pre-Reflective Situational Self. To do so, we will first show how alternative conceptions of pre-reflective self-awareness point to philosophical problems with the standard phenomenological view. We claim that this is mainly due to fact that within the phenomenological account the mineness aspect is implicitly playing several roles. Consequently, we argue that a thin interpretation of pre-reflective self-awareness—based on a thin notion of mineness—cannot do its needed job within, at least within psychopathology. This leads us to believe that a thicker conception of pre-reflective self is needed. We, therefore, develop the notion of the pre-reflective situational self by analyzing the dynamical nature of the relation between self-awareness and the world, specifically through our interactive inhabitation of the social world. (shrink)

Why should we think that there is such a thing as pre-reflective self-awareness? And how is this kind of self-awareness to be characterized? This paper traces a theoretical and a phenomenological line of argument in favor of the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness and explores how this notion can be further illuminated by appealing to recent work in the analytical philosophy of language and mind. In particular, it argues that the self is not represented in (...) the (nonconceptual) content of experience, but is rather implicit in the mode. Further, it argues that pre-reflective self-consciousness is best understood as a form of knowledge-how. Finally, it will be argued that our sense of self is thoroughly social, even at the basic, pre-reflective level. (shrink)

Patients in a Minimally Conscious State (MCS) constitute a subgroup of awareness impaired patients who show minimal signs of awareness as opposed to patients in a Vegetative State who do not exhibit any such signs. While the empirical literature is rich in studies investigating either overt or covert signs of awareness in such patients the question of self-awareness has only scarcely been addressed. Even in the occasion where self-awareness is concerned, it is only higher-order or reflective (...) class='Hi'>self-awareness that is the target of such investigations. In the first part of this paper, I briefly review the relevant clinical neuroscience literature to demonstrate that the conception of self-awareness at play in such studies is indeed that of reflective self-awareness. In the second part, I present the philosophical notion of pre-reflective (or minimal) self-awareness. This is shown to primarily refer to the implicit awareness of our embodied subjectivity which essentially permeates all our experiences. As discussed, this minimal self-awareness is not specifically addressed when clinically or experimentally assessing patients in MCS. My suggestion is that neuroimaging studies targeting minimal self-awareness as in First-Person Perspective-taking paradigms could be used with MCS patients to shed light on the question of whether those individuals are minimally self-aware even in the case where they lack self-reflective abilities. Empirical evidence of this kind could have important theoretical implications for the discussion about the notion of self-awareness but also potential medical and social/legal implications for awareness impaired patients’ management. (shrink)

In this paper I propose an account pre-reflective self-awareness, both vis-à-vis onself and vis-à-vis one’s own phenomenally conscious mental states and processes. I argue that pre-reflective self-awareness is a form of acquaintance with oneself and with one’s phenomenal states that is distinctively direct in this sense: it is not mediated by mental representations of those states or of oneself. I also argue that there is an important kind of reflective self-awareness that is reflexive, in (...) this sense: it involves mental representations of one’s phenomenally conscious states, and of oneself, in which pre-reflective self-awareness plays a distinctive contributory role—a role I call ‘direct self-presentation’. (shrink)

A bodily self is characterized by pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness that is.

Being conscious or experiencing the world with all its vivid qualities is something humans intimately cherish. The fact that consciousness provides us with a lively phenomenology is what makes life worth living. Yet, when it comes to understanding how consciousness fits into the natural world, we feel deeply puzzled. In this context, one important claim about consciousness consists in the idea that our awareness is not only about the world but also reveals an intimate subjectivity. This aspect of phenomenal consciousness (...) is often referred to as pre-reflective self-consciousness. It is often held that this type of self-awareness is intrinsic and essential to any form of conscious experience, i.e. there is no conscious experience without also being implicitly self-conscious. Being of such importance to the nature of consciousness, the recent literature mainly discusses two ways of accounting for pre-reflective self-consciousness, its role for conscious experience and how it fits into the natural world. On the one hand, there are relational views; on the other hand, there are non-relational accounts. This paper will argue that both approaches are not sustainable as they stand, since either important aspects are lost or not sufficiently embedded in the natural world. Consequently, I will argue for an alternative that allows for both a functional and an embodied nature of pre-reflective self-consciousness. (shrink)

I situate the originality and the ambiguities of the target paper in the context of post-cognitivist cognitive science and in relation with some aspects of Charles Sanders Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism. I then focus on what the authors call « pre-reflective self-consciousness », highlighting some ambiguities of the characterizations they propose of this variety of consciousness. These ambiguities can become difficulties once one grants a crucial methodological role to this consciousness in the study of cognitive activities.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, I shall first attempt to criticize Zahavi's notion of the “experiential self” as the latter is presented and developed in his book Self and Other (201...

후설 현상학은 제일철학적 철저주의의 이념에 의거하여 절대적 근원성의 해명을 추구한 철학이다. 이에 따라 후설 현상학이 궁극적으로 밝혀낸 절대적 근원성은 바로 선험적 주관성의 생생한 현재이다. 이 선험적 주관성의 생생한 현재는 모든 시간을 구성하는 근원시간화로서의 선시간적 근원성이다. 다시 말해 생생한 현재는 최초의 시간화인 자기현재화로서의 자기시간화를 통한 선험적 주관성의 시간적 자기구성의 가능 근거로서 궁극적으로 기능하는 근원자아이다. 이뿐만 아니라 생생한 현재는 모든 대상성을 시간위치적으로 시간화된 시간객체로서 구성하는 선험적 주관성의 시간적 대상구성의 가능 근거로서 궁극적으로 기능하는 근원자아이다. 이러한 생생한 현재는 시간화된 이후에야 비로소 성립하는 선험적 주관성의 (...) 현상학적 자기반성의 가능 근거로서 궁극적으로 기능하는 선반성적 자기동일성이다. 그런데 이러한 생생한 현재는 시간화 이전의 선시간적 근원성으로 인해 결코 반성적으로 대상화되어 파악될 수 없는 절대적 익명성을 지닌다. 따라서 이러한 생생한 현재는 반성적 자기의식의 인식론적 자기관계로써 이해될 수 없고, 선반성적 자기의식의 존재론적 자기관계로서 이해될 수 있다. (shrink)

Neither personal belief nor a phenomenal self model can exist without attachment to a pre-reflective core self.

This paper investigates the madeleine-memory as a case of pre-reflective experience, from the genesis of its sedimentation into the body. Indeed, I aim to address the question of the literary protagonist Marcel on the roots of his happiness and the genesis of his memories. Until now, the madeleine-memory has been described as bodily and involuntary. In phenomenology, a wide literature has confirmed the relationship between the sense of body ownership and pre-reflective self-awareness. I aim to build upon (...) such a mutual link and show that the pre-reflective roots of the madeleine-memory have to be traced back to the genesis of the involuntary recollections. To this purpose, I will illustrate that the epistemological relationship between the object and the subject plays a relevant role in the way the subject remembers. First, I will present that madeleine-memory is a unique case of bodily memory, by analyzing the main features that characterize it. Secondly, I will analyze the original experience of the madeleine within the phenomenological logic of transcendence in immanence. For this aim, I will rely on the Husserlian notions of “epistemological inadequacy of perception” and “background experiences”. Through these notions, I will show that Proustian involuntary recollections are pre-reflective experiences because previously subjects have pre-reflectively experienced the content of recollections. (shrink)

A theory of pre-reflective self-consciousness (TOPS) can be made fruitful if pre-reflectivity is understood as a bodily trait. This approach helps to overcome certain blurry definitions of pre-reflective self-consciousness (PrSCs) from the past, and can aid to a philosophical explanation of self-consciousness, which also goes in line with many psychological and cognitive neuro-scientific find­ings. Especially it can help to understand certain pathologies like neurodegenerative, affective or psychotic disorders from a different angle and thus might help (...) to bring new insights into these fields. (shrink)

This paper investigates the _madeleine_-memory (so-called from Proust's novel _In Search of Lost Time_) as a case of pre-reflective experience, from the genesis of its sedimentation into the body. Indeed, I aim to address the question of the literary protagonist Marcel on the roots of his happiness and the genesis of his memories. Until now, the _madeleine_-memory has been described as bodily and involuntary. In phenomenology, a wide literature has confirmed the relationship between the sense of body ownership and (...) pre-reflective self-awareness. I aim to build upon such a mutual link and show that the pre-reflective roots of the _madeleine_-memory have to be traced back to the genesis of the involuntary recollections. To this purpose, I will illustrate that the epistemological relationship between the object and the subject plays a relevant role in the way the subject remembers. First, I will present that _madeleine_-memory is a unique case of bodily memory, by analyzing the main features that characterize it. Secondly, I will analyze the original experience of the _madeleine_ within the phenomenological logic of _transcendence in immanence_. For this aim, I will rely on the Husserlian notions of “epistemological inadequacy of perception” and “background experiences”. Through these notions, I will show that Proustian involuntary recollections are pre-reflective experiences because previously subjects have pre-reflectively experienced the content of recollections. (shrink)

In this chapter, I introduce phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology by clarifying the kind of implicit experiences that phenomenologists are concerned with. In section one, I introduce the phenomenological concept of pre-reflective experience, focusing especially on its relation to the concept of implicit experience. In section two, I introduce the structure of pre-reflective self-consciousness, which has been studied extensively by both classical phenomenologists and contemporary phenomenological psychopathologists. In section three, I show how phenomenological psychopathologists rely on an account (...) of pre-reflective self-consciousness to better understand the experience of schizophrenia and I outline some of the methodological challenges that arise in this field of research. This introduction should facilitate critical engagement and collaboration between phenomenologists and researchers working across a variety of disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry, the cognitive sciences, and analytic philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Jean-Paul Sartre's theory, that all consciousness not only must have an object but also must always be self-aware, that a self-conscious "pre-reflective cogito" accompanies all consciousness. I attempt to show how this doctrine is meant to support Sarte's general rejection of the possibility of unconscious mental processes and that Sartre's arguments for the presence of such a self-conscious "pre-reflective cogito" in all consciousnesses are unsound.

The paper considers the problem of various different forms of pre‑cognitive affective appraisal and their role in the process of gaining self-knowledge. According to the phenomenological approach, if we are to understand our inner states (our emotional experiences), these cannot be extracted from the context within which they arise. Emotions not only refer to the inner states of the subject, but also to the outer world to which they are a form of response. Brentano, Husserl and Scheler claimed that (...) emotions are directed towards values. It is to this essential feature of emotional experience that I would like to turn. I shall therefore re-examine Sartre’s views concerning affectivity (i.e. the capacity to reveal evaluatively significant qualities of one’s environment), as well as the dual-aspect theory of (reflective and non-reflective) consciousness. The main argument of this paper is that a plausible account of the essential role of affectivity in the emotions may be provided on the basis of a phenomenological theory of pre-reflective consciousness and its relation to reflexivity. I will focus on three different claims about pre-reflective (affective) consciousness. According to the first of these, a large part of cognition is of a prelinguistic (pre-reflective) nature; I argue that the evaluative content of emotion is not only conceptually determined, but may also take a non-conceptual form (as affective appraisal). The second claim refers to the notion of affect, which ought to be distinguished from (unintentional) bodily sensations. The third conceives of the relation between pre-reflective (affective) consciousness and reflective consciousness (propositional attitudes) as normative (rather than causal). I aim to demonstrate that a plausible view of emotional affectivity must appeal to a phenomenological account of the pre-reflective aspect of consciousness. (shrink)

Much has been said about the formative process that occurs via the “hidden curriculum” of medical education during which many students experience a disconnect between the professional values espoused within the formal curriculum and the implicit values communicated through interactions with peers and mentors. Less attention, however, has been paid to the formation of the future medical self that takes place during students’ premedical years, a time in which many undergraduate students seek out immersive clinical experiences —such as medical (...) scribing— before applying to medical school. Despite the fact that medical scribes undoubtedly are affected by their clinical experiences, scribes are rarely offered opportunities to reflect on them. The authors contend that the developmental processes of medical scribes, especially those who intend on pursuing a career in the health professions, ought to be supported. This can be achieved, at least in part, through engaging in well-designed reflective sessions with other scribes. Encouraging students to reflect on their experiences can help them make sense of troubling events and give voice to the inconsistencies and value conflicts within medical practice that are so often ignored. The authors describe the development of their new Reflective Scribe program and offer suggestions for future directions. (shrink)

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self – a self-experience – whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also (...) phenomenally aware of the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness”, “for-me-ness”, “pre-reflective self-awareness” and “subjective character”, among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more sceptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)

Philosophers investigating the experiences of the dancing subject (Sheets-Johnstone 1980, 2009, 2011, 2012; Parviainen 1998; Legrand 2007, 2013; Legrand & Ravn 2009; Montero 2013; Foultier & Roos 2013) unearth vast variations of embodied consciousness and cognition in performing body experts. The traditional phenomenological literature provides us with descriptions and definitions of reflective self-consciousness as well as of pre-reflective bodily absorption, but when it comes to the states of self-consciousness dance philosophers refer to as thinking in movement (...) and a form of reflective consciousness at a bodily level – as well as to dancers’ re- ported experiences of being in a trance and yet hyper-aware – we are challenged in terms of terminology and precise descriptions. After empirical research on dancers’ experiences and studies of the above-mentioned philosophies of dance, aligning this material with Husserl, Zahavi and other phenomenologists’ descriptions of reflection and embodied self-consciousness, I find it plausible to acknowledge the existence of a third form of self- consciousness: embodied reflection, a reflective process experienced through and with the embodied and/or emotional self. In this article I aspire to capture the characteristics of this transcendence of the bodily self. (shrink)

The Brentanian idea that every state of consciousness involves a consciousness or awareness of itself (Brentano 1874), which has been a central tenet of the phenomenological school, is a current topic in contemporary philosophical debates about consciousness and subjectivity, both in the continental and the analytic tradition. Typically, the self-awareness that accompanies every state of consciousness is characterized as pre-reflective. Most theorists of pre-reflective self-awareness seem to converge on a negative characterization: pre-reflective self-awareness is (...) not a kind of reflective awareness. Whereas reflective self-awareness is attentive and descriptive, pre-reflective self-awareness is non-attentive and non-descriptive. This paper aims to show that the reflective/pre-reflective dichotomy overlooks a finer-grained distinction. The first part is devoted to arguing that the typical use of the adjective ‘pre-reflective’ conflates two properties (non-attentiveness and non-descriptiveness), which are in fact separable. Accordingly, not only can there be non-descriptive and non-attentive self-consciousness (i.e. pre-reflective self-awareness), but also non-descriptive but attentive self-consciousness. I call the latter primitive introspection. The second part of the paper is devoted to arguing that, whereas both pre-reflective self-awareness and primitive introspection enable the subject to apprehend the phenomenology of their experience, the kind of apprehension each allows for is different. By analyzing the notion of apprehension in terms of information acquisition and personal-level availability of information, it is proposed that, although both pre-reflective self-awareness and primitive introspection allow for acquisition of the maximal amount of information about the experience, only primitive introspection makes all such information personal-level available. (shrink)

We have recently started to understand that fundamental aspects of complex systems such as emergence, the measurement problem, inherent uncertainty, complex causality in connection with unpredictable determinism, time­irreversibility and non­locality all highlight the observer's participatory role in determining their workings. In addition, the principle of 'limited universality' in complex systems, which prompts us to search for the appropriate 'level of description in which unification and universality can be expected', looks like a version of Bohr's 'complementarity principle'. It is more or (...) less certain that the different levels of description possible of a complex whole ­­ actually partial objectifications ­­ are projected on to and even redefine its constituent parts. Thus it is interesting that these fundamental complexity issues don't just bear a formal resemblance to, but reveal a profound connection with, quantum mechanics. Indeed, they point to a common origin on a deeper level of description. (shrink)

I aim to show that, contrary to standard deflationary or eliminativist theories of the self, we can argue from the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness for the thesis that subjects of experience are substances. The phenomenological datum of subjectivity points to a specific metaphysical structure of our experience, that is, towards the substance view rather than the bundle or the minimal self view. Drawing on modern philosophical accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness and (self-) acquaintance, (...) I will argue that a subject is aware of being the one individual who has many experiences and that it is revealed to the subject that it is the bearer of experiences and their unifier. The subject is present in pre-reflective awareness and known as the subject of experiences, and even this minimal self-awareness gives us reason to favour the substance view. Thus, one can demonstrate how the debates on the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness and the metaphysics of selfhood intersect. (shrink)

The structure of everyday language implies that knowledge is an object. Like an object, it can be acquired, lost, stored, retrieved, and used. Anything that might be done to an external object could also be done to knowledge. Using concepts from the emerging field of biofunctional cognition, this paper discusses an alternative to the everyday-language framework of knowledge. The central idea is that the biological subsystems that comprise the physical nervous system have the capacity to create in us a live, (...) as opposed to pre-recorded, experience that might be described as intuitive self-awareness. In its various manifestations, this ongoing intuitive self-awareness is what we recognize as the knowledge inside us. There is no storage of knowledge of any kind. Intuitive self-awareness is in a perpetual state of re-creation and change. It serves as a private language with which the individual interacts directly with the subsystems of his/her own nervous system. This is the primary function of intuitive self-awareness &emdash; serving as the vehicle for the private communication between the individual and the individual's nervous system. Intuitive self-awareness has also come to serve, through evolutionary symbolic adaptation, as the foundation for the public language that the individual uses to communicate with other individuals. This is the secondary function of the intuitive self-awareness &emdash; to serve as the vehicle for public communication within social groups in which the individual lives. In this function, intuitive self-awareness externalizes to manifest itself in the form of an indirect code system for public communication. The nonsymbolic and symbolic forms of knowledge enable the organism to extend its internal world to encompass the external world in both its totality and detail. (shrink)

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self—a self-experience—whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of the (...) fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness,” “for-me-ness,” “pre-reflective self-awareness,” and “subjective character,” among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions, and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more skeptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)

This essay examines how C. S. Lewis, in Till We Have Faces, illustrates the Christian’s journey of sanctification through the pre-Christian story of his main character, Orual. She must gain two ‘faces’ in this process that correspond to the two books she writes. First, she must gain the face of self-knowledge through humility. The key components to this face are her memory and the act of writing of her first book, which together create a mirror to reflect her sin (...) back to her. Second, Orual must gain the face of transformation through divine agape love. The humility she learned from her first face now allows her to enter what Lewis describes as the dance of self-giving, which is a crucial element to the second face of transformation in its mortification of Orual’s sin and selfishness. In the second face, Orual gains access to an ‘actual language’ that transcends merely verbal words and involves worshipping the god with her whole being, as do we in being transformed to reflect Christ more clearly. Orual’s writing is a form of this ‘actual language’, and her second book that shares her personal encounter with the god of the mountain reflects to others the beauty of the divine. Similarly, Christians should reflect Jesus with their lives and their art, which are inextricably intertwined because a life lived for Him is the highest form of artwork they can create. (shrink)

CONCLUSION :Whoever wants to pursue just social reforms, breathe new life into political democracy, and improve the welfare of the weak will have to do more than convince people to speak differently about themselves. The first ailment that must be cured is not an improper use of language, but the anxiety that gives rise to that language.Anxiety cannot be removed by socially uninspired philosophies. Anxiety is not a problem of individuals but of society’s consciousness. The individualistic attitude of the dominant (...) group of Anglo-Saxon thinkers has hitherto hindered any consideration of group mentality. There is too little known about the processes at work in this trans-individual domain.If people felt that they were being respected concerning their meaning, then they would probably be easier to reconcile with their finitude and the finitude of those around them. They would be more willing to think about the welfare of the community. Respect, however, is not manipulable like an object that one can give and take. Respect only exists in a context of participation. Improving the quality of that context implies not only that people pay more attention to an honest use of language, but also to craftsmanship, art and culture. If there is anything that allows people to go on in spite of anxiety, it is their participation in the community that gives them courage, whose patterns of expectation give everyone a feeling of self-respect and whose internal solidarity curbs the economic sufferings of backward social groups.I had the impression while writing this that Bellah would agree with many points. Although some of his texts argue that social change will only be achieved through a return to biblical and republican narratives, others seem to indicate that he has a better sense than most Americans of how strong the pre-reflexive influence of the social temperament can be. (shrink)

The past two decades have been a time of heightened interest in the moral aspects of the practice of medicine. This interest has been reflected in medical education by the establishment of medical humanities programs in both preclinical and clinical education in many medical schools. It has also been reflected in the literature with a dramatic increase in journal articles on medical ethics as well as the development of medical ethics in textbooks. A number of journals have developed that are (...) specifically devoted to medical ethics, including The Journal of Medical Ethics, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Theoretical Medicine, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, just to name a few. The literature includes both theoretical foundations and conceptual analyses of particular issues as well as practical advice and general suggestions for how to implement programs in medical humanities. (shrink)

The prominent call to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia raises questions concerning whether its achievement will result in amplified societal acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and on what grounds this acceptance will take place. Same-sex marriage may not challenge heteronormative and patriarchal features typically associated with marriage, and may serve to reinforce a hierarchy that promotes traditional marriage as the ideal relationship structure. This may result in only assimilationist acceptance of LGBT people. However, the consequence of (...) inclusion to marriage ought to reflect social acceptance of LGBTs as people worthy of equal treatment in dignity and in rights, regardless of perceived differences or similarities to a supposed majority standard. This article argues that justice would be best served by introducing and promoting a variety of State-sanctioned unions whilst simultaneously introducing same-sex marriage. This ‘pluralisation strategy’ would increase awareness and legitimacy of other relationship-recognition options, promoting respectful acceptance of LGBT and heterosexual people alike. (shrink)