Online research in philosophy

The immediate successors of Kant in classical German philosophy considered a subjectivity irreducible to objecthood as the core of personhood. The thesis of an irreducible subjectivity has, after the German idealists, been advocated by the phenomenological movement, as well as by analytical philosophers of self-consciousness such as Hector-Neri Castaneda and Sydney Shoemaker. Their arguments together show that self-consciousness cannot be reduced to a relation whereby a subject grasps itself as an object, but that there must be a core of subjectivity (...) always already familiar with itself before reflection. A number of contemporary accounts of self-consciousness are unaware of these old and new arguments, and flawed in that they do not account for the core 'non-objectal subjectivity' necessary for self-consciousness and. (shrink)

In the development of modern philosophy self-consciousness was not generally or unanimously given important consideration. This was because philosophers such as Descartes, Kant and Fichte thought it served as the highest principle from which we can 'deduce' all propositions that rightly claimed validity. However, the Romantics thought that the consideration of self-consciousness was of the highest importance even when any claim to foundationalism was abandoned. In this respect, Hölderlin and his circle, as well as Novalis and Schleiermacher, thought that self-consciousness, (...) itself, was not a principle but must be ranked on a minor or dependent level, and presupposed the Absolute as a superior but inaccessible condition or ground. This reservation did not hinder them from recognising that the foundationalist Fichte was the first to have shown conclusively that from Descartes, via German Rationalism and British Empiricism, up to Kant, self-consciousness was misconceived of as the result of an act of reflection by which a second-order act bent back upon a first-order act that is identical to itself. This conception entailed circular entanglements and infinite regresses, and was too high a price to pay. Whereas Fichte thought pre-reflexive self-awareness was a philosophical principle, the Romantics and their vehement critic Kierkegaard, abandoned the idea of self-consciousness as a foundational starting point of philosophy. Instead, they founded self-consciousness on transcendent Being, a prior non-conceptual consciousness ('feeling') and reproached Fichte for having fallen back into the repudiated reflection model of self-consciousness. (shrink)