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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 capacity of human knowers to turn their cognitive powers upon themselves has long fascinated philosophers. My book Transparency and Reflection grew out of an attempt to comprehend a fundamental thought from Kant about the significance of this capacity for self-consciousness: namely, that it transforms the general character of human knowing, giving rise to a distinctively rational form of cognition and supplying the basis for a distinctively philosophical understanding of our own minds and of the world with which they engage. (...) In seeking to understand these Kantian ideas, however, I found myself struggling with difficulties that led me to re-think my approach, moving away from a Kantian formulation of these points and toward one inspired by ideas from Sartre. In the present essay, I describe the difficulties that led me from Kant to Sartre, and I also seek to explain how, in spite of this shift in perspective, my book bears out various fundamental Kantian thoughts about the significance of human self-consciousness. (shrink)

This English translation of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness evokes the movement and flavor of the original, clarifies its obscurities, and eliminates the repetitions.

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...

: Building on recent linguistic and philosophical research on quasi-indexicals, self-consciousness, anaphora, and discours indirect libre, I argue that they raise problems for the definition of self-knowledge understood according to the Classical Definition of Knowledge. I call this extremely difficult problem the “non-detachment problem”. I show that, for this reason, self-knowledge must always be considered perspectival and non-third-personal, in the relevant cases. I also discuss and criticize the Lewis-Chierchia interpretation of de se attitudes. Furthermore, I discuss the role of the (...) self in the strict sense in an adequate account of so-called self-knowledge, and in a problem closely related to the “non-detachment problem”, that of the reconstruction of the cogito. Keywords: Indexicals; Quasi-indexicals; Classical Definition of Knowledge; Self-knowledge; Self-consciousness Considerazioni su quasi-indicali, autoriferimento e conoscenza di sé Riassunto: Sulla base di recenti ricerche linguistiche e filosofiche sui quasi-indicali, l‘autocoscienza, l’anafora e il discours indirect libre, intendo sostenere che essi sollevano difficoltà, già anticipate da Castañeda e altri, per la definizione della conoscenza di sé, se essa è pensata secondo la definizione classica di conoscenza considerata almeno come condizione necessaria della conoscenza. Chiamo questo problema di difficilissima soluzione il “problema della non distaccabilità”. Cercherò di mostrare che, di conseguenza, la conoscenza di sé deve essere intesa come sempre “prospettica” e non di terza persona, nei casi rilevanti. Intendo poi discutere criticamente l’interpretazione di Lewis e Chierchia delle attitudini de se. Inoltre, discuto il ruolo del sé in senso stretto in un resoconto adeguato della cosiddetta conoscenza di sé e in un problema prossimo a quello della “non distaccabilità”: il problema della ricostruzione del cogito. Parole chiave: Indicali; Quasi-indicali; Definizione classica della conoscenza; Conoscenza di sé; autocoscienza. (shrink)

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)

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)

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism suggests that the sense of normative terms like “ought” and “good” as they appear in ethical discourse is to be elucidated in terms of the relation in which a living individual stands to the life-form or “species” of which it is an exemplar—in our case: the human life-form. A theory of this form has to provide a story about questions such as: What enables us to distinguish the different kinds of life within the theory? What makes them, (...) despite those differences, all sorts of natural goodness? And where, in relation to those continuities and discontinuities, is the account of practical reason to be situated? In this paper, I investigate how a developed ethical naturalism has to conceive of the relation between the genus concept life and the concept of the specific kind of life characteristic of us: rational or practically self-conscious life. I argue that there is a deep ambiguity with respect to this question in the account Philippa Foot presents in Natural Goodness. An ambiguity that covers a dilemma. A properly developed ethical naturalism would have to develop the concept of reason out of the reflection on life. (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)

I review the problem of how to define consciousness. I suggest that rather than continuing that debate, we should turn to phenomenological description of experience to discover the common aspects of consciousness. In this way we can say that consciousness is characterized by intentionality, phenomenality, and non-reflective self-awareness. I explore this last characteristic in detail and I argue against higher-order representational theories of consciousness, with reference to blindsight and motor control processes.

Nishida Kitaro's reformulation of the major issues of Western philosophy from a Zen standpoint of "absolute nothingness" and "absolutely contradictory self-identity" represents the boldest speculative enterprise of modern Japan, continued today by his successors in the "Kyoto School" of philosophy. This English translation of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness evokes the movement and flavor of the original, clarifies its obscurities, and eliminates the repetitions. It sheds new light on the philosopher's career, revealing a long struggle with such thinkers as Cohen, (...) Natorp, Husserl, Fichte, and Bergson, that ended with Nishida's break from the basic ontological assumptions of the West. Throughout labyrinthine arguments, Nishida never loses sight of his theme: the irreducibility and unobjectifiability of the act of self-consciousness which constitutes the self. Extensive annotation is provided for the first time in any edition of Nishida's work. Historians of Japanese philosophy and culture, and all those interested in the interaction of Eastern and Western thought-forms, now have a document which highlights many of the cultural, psychological, and intellectual dynamics that have shaped Japanese intellectual life in one of its most fascinating and ambitious manifestations. (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)

After some preliminary distinctions, this paper will discuss the merits of higher-order representational theory and same-order theory. A distinction will be introduced between a intrinsic conception of consciousness and a representational variant . It will be argued that the SOIT account of 'non-reflective self-awareness' can be applied to understanding aspects of psychopathology. However, a closer look at specific aspects of schizophrenic experience reveals that we might need to widen the scope of and 'situate' the SOIT of non-reflective selfawareness.

Is self-consciousness intentional? Consciousness of oneself-as-object is, in the sense that the subject is there taken as its own object of intentional consciousness. Contrastively, it has been argued that consciousness of oneself-as-subject is not intentional, precisely in that it does not involve taking oneself as an intentional object. Here, it is rather proposed that consciousness of oneself-as-subject is tied to intentionality in that it involves being conscious of oneself as an intentional subject, i.e. as a subject directed at intentional objects (...) transcending oneself-as-subject. This form of self-consciousness is neither reflective, in the sense that it does not involve to take oneself as an object of reflection, nor reflexive, in the sense that it does not involve to be related to oneself but to what-one-is-not, i.e. to the transcending intentional object. It is further argued that consciousness of oneself-as-subject involves two dynamics, as the subject would be indicated to himself by the objects towards which he directs himself. These considerations are here unfolded to consider in particular bodily self-consciousness. (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)

This article critically examines Christine Korsgaard's claim in her Tanner Lectures to find in self-consciousness itself the norms that would answer our need for practical reasons, insofar as that need is constituted through our capacity for reflection. It shows that the way in which Korsgaard sees “the need for a reason” as arising out of self-consciousness implies a dilemma: on the one hand, we want as the ultimate source of our reasons an authority of which we cannot coherently demand legitimation (...) in turn; on the other, our freedom demands that nothing count for us as a reason except insofar as it is in turn endorsed in reflection. Relying on resources drawn from the tradition of reflection, this paper argues that Korsgaard's attempt to resolve this tension is unsuccessful and appeals, in response to this failure, to faith in the authority of our reasons in the absence of foundational justification of them. (shrink)

Henrich (1966) has contributed to the revival of philosophical debates on subjectivity and its irreducibility, starting from Fichte’s notion of "insight", and focusing his attention on the reflective model of self-consciousness. Subsequent studies have followed the same line from different perspectives, emphasizing the basic role of pre-reflective self-consciousness as the condition of possibility of conscious experience. The so-called ubiquity thesis has been developed through analysis of indexical thinking.

When you are in a joyful mood, how do you know that it is so? On a Cartesian picture, the answer is that you’ve got some immediate, noninferential apprehension of your being joyful, such as this noninferential apprehension is analogous to sense perception, and unlike sense perception, it makes it unquestionable or evident to you that you presently are in a joyful mood. In this paper, I defend this view against some classical objections, arguing that pre-reflective self-consciousness actually is (...) analogous to sense perception. (shrink)

The problem of self-consciousness has been an essential one for philosophy since the onset of modernity. Both E. Tugendhat and the Heidelberg School represented by D. Henrich have reflected critically upon the traditional theory of self-consciousness, and both have revealed the circular dilemma of the “reflection-model” adopted by the traditional theory. In order to avoid the dilemma, they both proposed substitute formulas, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. Husserl also paid particular attention to the traditional theory of self-consciousness (...) in his phenomenology. Through the distinctions of “primal consciousness” and “reflection,” Husserl explored the core problem of the traditional theory of self-consciousness in two different dimensions. In his critique, Husserl clarified the founding relation between primal consciousness and reflection, and in contrast to Tugendhat’s semantic approach, he developed a new reflection-model of self-consciousness which effectively avoids the circular dilemma of the traditional theory and does not narrow the problem domain of that theory. (shrink)

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, selfconsciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively (...) inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth. (shrink)

In seinem Aufsatz “Transparency, Self-Consciousness, and Reflection” und in seinem Buch Transparency and Reflection entwickelt Boyle eine Lösung für das Problem der Transparenz. Antworten, die auf Fragen über das Bewusstsein gegeben werden, bringen demnach nur die Arten des Gegebenseins zum Ausdruck, die in Antworten auf weltbezogene Fragen schon enthalten sind. Diese sowie auch die Lösung für ein anderes Problem, das Boyle „the anti-egoist challenge“ nennt, gründen auf der Idee, dass eine Antwort auf eine weltbezogene Frage eine Art des Gegebenseins enthält, (...) die ihrerseits implizit auf das antwortende Subjekt referiert. Diese wird expliziert, wenn eine Frage über das Bewusstsein beantwortet wird. Mir scheint, dass diese Idee einen Fallstrick spannt. Denn damit die von Boyle vorgeschlagene Lösung gelingt, muss die relevante Referenz auf die erste Person in einer Art des Gegebenseins des Subjekts bestehen. Doch wenn diese Art des Gegebenseins die typische Fregeanische Spezifizierung erfüllt, dann ist sie privat, – und genauso privat ist dann auch die Art des Gegebenseins, in der sie enthalten ist. Folglich wird sich die Privatheit über diejenigen Antworten, die sich auf Fragen über das Bewusstsein richten, auf alle Antworten hinaus ausbreiten, die sich auf die mit ihnen verknüpften Fragen über die Welt richten. (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)

This paper takes Zahavi’s view to task that every conscious experience involves a “minimal sense of self.” Zahavi bases his claim on the observation that experience, even on the pre-reflective level, is not only about the object, but also has a distinctive qualitative aspect which is indicative of the fact that it is for me. It has the quality of what he calls “for-meness” or “mineness.” Against this I argue that there are not two phenomena but only one. On (...) the pre-reflective level, experience is transparent. Conscious experience may well be reflexive but this does not imply that I additionally have a sense of what it is like for me to have that experience. I do not just happen to disagree with Zahavi’s account of pre-reflective experience but, more importantly, I am concerned that he imposes it onto his interpretation of Edmund Husserl. Zahavi claims that when Husserl argues that consciousness is necessarily a form of self-consciousness, he must be committed to the view that we necessarily have a sense of ownership. However, Husserl only claims that I am self-conscious but not that I am a self that owns its consciousness. Zahavi thus misses the novelty of Husserl’s position, namely that I do not need to have a sense of abiding ownership, to have experience. (shrink)

The concept of the self is embedded in a web of relationships of other concepts and phenomena such as consciousness, self-consciousness, personal identity and the mind–body problem. The article follows the ontological and epistemological roles of the concept of selfconsciousness and the structural co-implication of consciousness and self-consciousness from Descartes and Locke to Kant and Sartre while delineating its subject matter from related inquiries into the relationship between the mind and the body, personal identity, and the question whether consciousness is (...) an irreducible reality sui generis or essentially a neurobiological entity. Over the course of its history, the modern self turns out to become an ever more elusive phenomenon, while its roles as a bearer of individual responsibility and as a subject of reflective endorsement of the truth become ever more pronounced. (shrink)

J. G. Fichte held that a form of intersubjectivity—what he called a ‘summons’—is a condition of possibility of self-consciousness. This thesis is widely taken to be one of Fichte’s most influential contributions to the European philosophy of the last two centuries. But what the thesis actually states is far from obvious; and existing interpretations either are poorly supported by the texts or else render the thesis trivial or implausible. I propose a new interpretation, on which Fichte’s claim is that (...) class='Hi'>reflective self-consciousness arises in the context of ad hoc efforts to coordinate action. (shrink)

Autism provides a model for exploring the nature of self‐consciousness: self‐consciousness requires the ability to reflect on mental states, and autism is a disorder with a specific impairment in the neurocognitive mechanism underlying this ability. Experimental studies of normal and abnormal development suggest that the abilities to attribute mental states to self and to others are closely related. Thus inability to pass standard ‘theory of mind’ tests, which refer to others’ false beliefs, may imply lack of self‐consciousness. (...) Individuals who persistently fail these tests may, in the extreme, be unable to reflect on their intentions or to anticipate their own actions. In contrast, individuals with high‐functioning autism or Asperger syndrome often possess a late‐acquired, explicit theory of mind, which appears to be the result of effortful learning. An experimental study with three people with Asperger syndrome suggested that level of performance on standard theory of mind tasks was strongly related to the ability to engage in introspection. Qualitative differences in the introspections of high‐functioning people with autism are also reflected in autobiographical accounts which may give a glimpse of what it is like to be autistic. (shrink)

Some computer programs are expert at some games. Other programs can recognize some words. Yet other programs are highly competent at solving certain technical problems. However, each of those programs is specialized, and no existing program today shows the common sense or resourcefulness of a typical two-year-old child—and certainly, no program can yet understand a typical sentence from a child’s first-grade storybook. Nor can any program today can look around a room and then identify the things that meet its eyes.

This paper draws upon my research into the posthumously published fragmentary remains of Hölderlin and Novalis's philosophical reflections to describe how their explanations of the possibility of self-consciousness are far more convincing than those provided by their philosophical contemporaries, and still have much to contribute to contemporary debates concerning the nature of 'consciousness' and 'selfhood.' The paper begins by sketching the background to their accounts of self-consciousness, that is, Fichte's critique of Kant's 'reflection model' of self-consciousness and the subsequent critique (...) of Fichte's 'solution' to this problem by more orthodox Kantians. I shall then present an account of how Hölderlin and Novalis may be said to enact a 'synthesis' of the opposed Kantian and Fichtean positions, to formulate an account of self-consciousness that on one hand acknowledges the power of—in Henrich's words—Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht into the inadequacy of the Kantian 'reflection model,' whilst, on the other hand, re-appropriating such a 'reflection model.' They thus argue that I am only aware of myself as T by means of a reflective act, whilst at the same time arguing that such awareness nevertheless involves a non-reflective 'dimension.' For Hölderlin and Novalis, therefore, consciousness is always intentionally directed, and yet in being intentionally directed, it is also non-reflectively related to itself or "self-luminous" sea conception of consciousness which has similarities with Sartre's conception of the 'pre-reflective cogito.'. (shrink)

The chapter explores some aspects of the relationship between self-consciousness and consciousness of others, by looking in particular at the phenomenology of social anxiety disorder. More specifically, drawing on the phenomenological distinction between pre-reflective and reflective self-consciousness, and its application to the study of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, I suggest that the disturbances of social experience characteristic of social anxiety disorder are rooted in certain alterations of self-experience, and I endeavour to provide an account of the latter. More specifically, (...) I claim that a) pathological social anxiety involves a heightening of the subject’s reflective self-consciousness, and b) that this, at least partly, originates in the experience of a low sense of self-worth, which I refer to as low “self-esteem”, and conceive of as a particular kind of background affective orientation. (shrink)

The text surveys the development of the debate between Zahavi and Brough/Sokolowski regarding Husserl’s account of inner time-consciousness. The main arguments on both sides are reconsidered, and a compromise is proposed.

The central tenet in the ontology Sartre describes and seeks to defend in Being and Nothingness is that being divides into the for-itself and the in-itself. Self-consciousness characterizes being-for-itself and distinguishes it from being-in-itself. What it means for a being to exist for itself is that it is self-conscious. How Sartre characterizes self-consciousness in Being and Nothingness is, however, a question that remains to be asked. There is no simple answer to this question. For Sartre, there are really several levels (...) of self-consciousness: the self-consciousness of consciousness at the pre-reflective level, at the level of reflection and at the level of being-for-others. There is a profound difference between the self-consciousness of being-for-others and impure reflection, on the one hand, and the self-consciousness of reflection and pre-reflective consciousness, on the other. With being-for-others and impure reflection, self-consciousness involves the attempt to grasp the self as an object for consciousness. Although the nature of this attempt and the reasons for its ultimate failure differ at each level, these levels are bound together by a common sense of self-consciousness as a consciousness of the self as an object. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;We find ourselves in a world not of our own making; and in acquiring knowledge about the world and our situation in it we have nothing to go on but our psychological states; they are the immediate given. Let us label this claim the Basic Datum. What I shall call the Minimal Constraint is the claim, 'An account of the states of mind of subjects credited with knowledgeable thoughts (...) about a mind-independent world must show how the intrinsic properties of such states of mind could yield such knowledge'. That is, a theory of thought must explain the Basic Datum. ;The Basic Datum may seen an obvious truism, and so too may the Minimal Constraint. But if 'obvious' means 'undisputed', neither of these claims is that. First, to say that is acquiring knowledge about the world we are restricted to the immediate deliverances of our psychological states, is to make a major concession to a central plank in the sceptic's argument against the possibility of knowing a mind-independent world. Many think that to deny the sceptic's conclusion we must reject this claim. Causal theories of reference, theories of direct acquaintance and so forth are often formulated with this aim in mind. ;Secondly, the Basic Datum is formulated from the first person perspective; as is the Minimal Constraint. Adoption of this perspective is necessary for generating scepticism; and many think that in order to rebut scepticism we must abandon the first person perspective when explaining the nature of knowledge. A fortiori, they hold that an explanation of the nature of a subjects psychological states when thinking knowledgeable thoughts about the world should not be constrained by questions raised from the first person perspective. ;Doubts of the first kind about the validity of the Constraint fall under what I shall call the Reference Debate; and doubts of the second kind under what I shall call the Reflectivity Debate. Throughout I shall be concerned with these debates as they apply to the phenomenology of experience-embedded thoughts, where by phenomenology I mean no more than the intrinsic properties of the state of mind of subjects credited with such thoughts. More specifically, I shall focus on the state of mind corresponding to the demonstrative component in experience-embedded thoughts expressible by such utterances as, "This is square". I shall refer to such states of mind as 'demonstrative states of mind'; and to experience-embedded thoughts containing a demonstrative component as 'demonstrative thoughts'. All my examples will be of vision-based demonstrative thought, but nothing is supposed to hang on this. (shrink)

: Self-consciousness is considered in a framework comprising four dimensions which are theoretically defined and supported by clinical neuropsychological evidence. Self-monitoring is defined as the ability to reflect on one’s own behaviour, with supporting evidence for deficits in this capacity noted in anosognosia syndrome. Self-feeling is defined as the capacity to feel all sensations related to one’s own body, with supporting evidence from deficiencies occurring in alexithymia, psychosomatic states and Cotard’s delusion. Identity refers to the capacity to recognize an object (...) as identical to oneself, based on autobiographic memory; pathological conditions related to this dimension include delusions of identity and the Zelig syndrome. Ownership is the capacity to perceive the status of ones’ own body, and is clinically altered in somatoparaphrenia. All four dimensions are related to specific brain networks. Keywords: Self-Monitoring; Self-Feeling; Identity; Ownership; Neurocognitive Dimensions Le dimensioni neurocognitive dell’autocoscienza Riassunto: L’autocoscienza viene inquadrata in base a quattro dimensioni, determinate in via teorica e supportate da evidenze cliniche di carattere neuropsicologico. L’automonitoraggio è definito quale capacità di riflettere sul proprio comportamento ed è sostenuto da evidenze che derivano da quella sindrome denominata anosognosia. Il sentire il proprio sé è la capacità di avvertire tutte le sensazioni del corpo proprio ; questa dimensione è supportata da evidenze derivanti da condizioni cliniche quali l’alessitimia, le affezioni psicosomatiche e il delirio di Cotard. L’identità si riferisce alla capacità di riconoscere come identico a se stesso un oggetto, fondata sulla memoria autobiografica; le condizioni patologiche legate a questa dimensione sono il delirio di identità e la sindrome di Zelig. Il possesso di sé è la capacità di percepire lo stato del proprio corpo, condizione che risulta alterata nella somatoparafrenia. Tutte queste quattro dimensioni sono collegate a specifici network cerebrali. Parole chiave: Automonitoraggio; Sentimento di sé; Identità; Padronanza di sé; Dimensioni neurocognitive. (shrink)

This monograph offers new insights into the connection between self-consciousness and emotion. It focuses on what fundamental “feelings of being” tell us about ourselves. The results enrich the philosophy of human affectivity and help shed new light on some pressing, current problems. The author seeks to understand self-consciousness as an affective phenomenon, namely as self-feeling. He identifies it as a pre-reflective, pre-propositional, bodily feeling that shapes our space of possibilities. It is the affective disclosure of individual existence. His account (...) overcomes the difficulties of infinite regress and vicious circularity that reflective accounts of self-consciousness struggle with. At the same time, it helps build a bridge between the basic level of self-consciousness and the higher level of more substantial thoughts about oneself. The title explores fundamental affectivity, Matthew Ratcliffe’s theory of existential feelings, features of self-feeling, and appropriateness and inappropriateness in self-interpretation. It also considers the contributions of the Heidelberg School of self-consciousness to current debates. The title provides students and researchers with a unique look into such vital philosophical questions as: What is self-consciousness? How do we know ourselves? It will also appeal to a wider audience interested in self-consciousness and/or human affectivity since it does not presuppose knowledge of the jargon. (shrink)