Evans's anti-cartesian argument: A critical evaluation
Ratio 19 (June):214-228 (2006)
| Abstract | In chapter 7 of The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans claimed to have an argument that would present "an antidote" to the Cartesian conception of the self as a purely mental entity. On the basis of considerations drawn from philosophy of language and thought, Evans claimed to be able to show that bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness. The apparent basis for this claim is the datum that sometimes judgements about one’s position based on body sense are immune to errors of misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun 'I'. However, Evans’s argument suffers from a crucial ambiguity. 'I' sometimes refers to the subject's mind, sometimes to the person, and sometimes to the subject's body. Once disambiguated, it turns out that Evans’s argument either begs the question against the Cartesian or fails to be plausible at all. Nonetheless, the argument is important for drawing our attention to the idea that bodily modes of awareness should be taken seriously as possible forms of self-awareness. | |||||||||
| Keywords | self-awareness immunity to error through misidentification body and self Gareth Evans | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesBill Brewer (1995). Bodily Awareness and the Self. In Jose Luis Bermudez, Anthony J. Marcel & Naomi M. Eilan (eds.), The Body and the Self. Cambridge, Mass: Mit Press.
José Luis Bermúdez (2005). Evans and the Sense of "I". In José Luis Bermúdez (ed.), Thought, Reference, and Experience: Themes From the Philosophy of Gareth Evans. Clarendon Press.
P. Cogliolo, V. Romano, R. Villani & M. Galano (1993). Effectiveness of Evans' Technique for the Evaluation of Awareness. In P. S. Sebel, B. Bonke & E. Winograd (eds.), Memory and Awareness in Anesthesia 2. Prentice-Hall.
Kent Johnson (2003). Are There Semantic Natural Kinds of Words? Mind and Language 18 (2):175–193.
Elizabeth Barnes (2009). Indeterminacy, Identity and Counterparts: Evans Reconsidered. Synthese 168 (1):81 - 96.
Joel Smith (2003). Self-Consciousness and Embodied Experience. Dissertation, UCL
Rick Grush (2007). Evans on Identification-Freedom. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (4):605-617.
Cheryl K. Chen (2011). Bodily Awareness and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification. European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):21-38.
John Schwenkler (2013). The Objects of Bodily Awareness. Philosophical Studies 162 (2):465-472.
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