Self-Consciousness, Misc

The problem of the unity of consciousness gains its impetus from the work of Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason. The problem Kant leaves us is that the unity of consciousness is taken to be the ground for and basis of the very possibility of our having the kinds of experiences that we have. Yet while this unity explains all sorts of phenomena, it itself remains in some very real sense beyond our grasp. To unravel the problem of (...) the unity of consciousness we must explore the way in which consciousness reveals itself to us and break through certain paradoxes that arise during this quest. The uncovering of pure reflection by the work of the phenomenologists reveals to us that consciousness is intentional. We also discover that consciousness is at the same time a non-positional self-consciousness. This basic structure of consciousness, which I name "apperception", accounts for the unity of consciousness. By examining consciousness in apperception we see that the unity of consciousness is organic. (shrink)

Sebastian Rödl portrays much of his work as attempts at articulating a German idealist view of self-consciousness. Although he rarely engages directly with German idealist texts, his accounts of first-person and second-person knowledge arrive at strikingly Fichtean theses regarding the necessary identity of subject and object in the former and the necessary reciprocity of subject and other in the latter. Despite this affinity, I argue, Rödl's accounts lack a feature that is essential to Fichte's and, indeed, to German idealism's distinctive (...) orientation: the thought of a first principle. I show that while second-person knowledge between subjects is genetically prior to self-consciousness—for Fichte as for Rödl—first-person knowledge of the I as first principle is systematically prior to self-consciousness—a point of architectonic and anti-nihilistic importance for Fichte, but which goes missing on Rödl's accounts, thereby obstructing their intended German idealist articulation. (shrink)

The achievement of self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology hinges on establishing a relationship with another self-conscious being. How this is accomplished, and even that it is accomplished in Hegel’s text, are topics of dispute and misunderstanding in the literature. I show how Hegel argues for this intersubjective origin of self-consciousness, first, by comparing Hegel’s analysis of lord and bondsman to Sartre’s analysis of intimacy. Second, I focus on two in-terpretive challenges. First, I argue that the staking of life comes from an (...) other-oriented epistemological relation, and not simply from an im-mediate concern with dominating the other. Second, contrary to many interpretations which see the bondsman’s development arising out of an isolated activity merely between himself and the products of his labor, I argue that the slave’s ability to gain knowledge of himself as a self is only possible by establishing a relationship with the lord. This point is essential because, if readings of the bondsman’s development as isolated from the lord are correct, then Hegel has in fact not succeeded in showing that self-consciousness only develops out of intersubjective recognition. (shrink)

Se desarrolla la concepción normativista de la autoconciencia hegeliana, de acuerdo con los aportes de los denominados "neohegelianos de Pittsburgh", así como de otros autores anglosajones como Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard y Paul Redding. Se presenta el recorrido de la autoconciencia en el capítulo IV de la Fenomenología del Espíritu, y se desarrollan algunos rasgos que pueden extraerse de dicha presentación, de acuerdo con la lectura normativista de los autores mencionados. The normativist conception of Hegelian self-consciousness according to the contributions (...) of the so-called "Pittsburgh neo-Hegelians" is developed along with the contributions of other English-speaking scholars such as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Paul Redding. An overview is given of self-consciousness as laid out in chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and some of the features that can be extracted from this overview are developed according to a normativist reading of the authors mentioned. (shrink)

War captivity is an extreme traumatic experience typically involving exposure to repeated stressors, including torture, isolation, and humiliation. Captives are flung from their previous known world into an unfamiliar reality in which their state of consciousness may undergo significant change. In the present study extensive interviews were conducted with fifteen Israeli former prisoners of war who fell captive during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with the goal of examining the architecture of human thought in subjects lacking a sense of body (...) (disembodiment) as a result of confinement and isolation. Analysis of the interviews revealed that threats to a normal sense of body often lead to a loss of the sense of time as an objective dimension. Evidence suggests that the loss of the sense of body and the loss of the sense of time are in fact connected; that is, they collapse together. This breakdown in turn results in a collapse of the sense of self. (shrink)

Considering what Kant says with regard to self consciousness, one can question whether Kant is able to claim that his position is substantially different than the positions of David Hume and Rene Descartes. He agrees with Hume that we do not have a permanent perception of ourselves. Conversely, he concurs with Descartes in saying that the "I think" plays a substantival role in experience. He argues that the consciousness involved in judgment must be singular and endure. On the other hand (...) he maintains that one cannot argue successfully from the "I think" to the conclusion that the soul is a simple enduring substance. These views are apparently inconsistent. ;In an examination of the Critique I argue that these positions are consistent. I argue that Kant improves over the position of Hume in that he discovered another route to justification for our belief that there is an identical consciousness at the seat of experience. Where Hume accepted justification of a notion only when he could discover an original impression to account for its logical character, Kant was able to justify the notion of an identical consciousness by reference to arguments concerning the necessary conditions for experience. One can find similar arguments in Hume. When he discusses the notion of independently existing objects, he describes this notion as a fiction which allows us to resolve contradictory experiences. The relationship to Descartes is equally complex. While the Paralogisms section is aimed at dualistic arguments much like those attributed to Descartes, we see, if we examine both philosopher's writings, that their positions are closer in their agnosticism than Kant took them to be. ;In the process of explicating the relationships between these men, I spell out Kant's theory of "empirical self consciousness", according to which we can know a great deal about our own history only if we consider ourselves to be in causal commerce with external bodies. I will argue that this sort of argument lies at the heart of the Deduction of the Categories , and ties that section in with the Analogies of Experience, Refutation of Idealism, and the Principles sections. (shrink)

There is a widespread misinterpretation of kant according to which an analytic judgment is one that follows from a definition. Through a study of kant's theory of definition, And the role in knowledge that he ascribes to definition, It is shown that this is indeed a misinterpretation. Much criticism of kant's theory of analytic judgments is vitiated by substituting a modern definition of "analytic" for the one kant gave.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's _Phenomenology of Perception_ is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important contributions to philosophy of the twentieth century. In this volume, leading philosophers from Europe and North America examine the nature and extent of Merleau-Ponty's achievement and consider its importance to contemporary philosophy. The chapters, most of which were specially commissioned for this volume, cover the central aspects of Merleau-Ponty's influential work. These include: Merleau-Ponty’s debt to Husserl Merleau-Ponty’s conception of philosophy perception, action and the role (...) of the body consciousness and self-consciousness naturalism and language social rules and freedom. Contributors: David Smith, Sean Kelly, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Hubert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, Thomas Baldwin, Simon Glendinning, Naomi Eilan, Eran Dorfman, Francoise Dastur. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the themes of temporality and alterity as they were developed over the first three of Descartes’s Meditations. I discuss the temporality of the evil deceiver, as well as the implicit theory of time and time-consciousness in the Second Meditation. I show that this theory of time is purely subjective, continuous, pre-numerical, and independent of local motion and the body, thus making it independent of Aristotle’s theory of time. I then explain God’s continuous creation of time (...) and the discontinuous theory of time Descartes develops in the Third Meditation. Moreover, I show that there is an ontological and temporal priority of the Other over the self, and that temporal self-consciousness is necessarily also consciousness of God, his continuous creation of time, time itself, and other finite substances. (shrink)

_Study of self-consciousness in Hegel and Shakespeare._.

This paper elucidates some aspects of the relationship between self-consciousness and self-portraiture. It starts from Sartre's analysis of the experience of our own body and from the supposed dependence of our own self-consciousness on the intervention of the other. Making use of Derrida's reflections in Mémoires d'aveugle and Joseph L. Koerner's reading of German Renaissance self-portraiture, the author describes Dürer's Munich self-portrait and some of Rembrandt's late self-portraits. Dürer's painting is understood as an attempt to close the circle of self-reflection, (...) while trying to include the other in his scenario of representation of himself as a kind of divine and timeless entity. Rembrandt's late self-portraits in contrast serve to show another possibility of selfrepresentation: a form of self-awareness and self-affirmation in the face of human finitude and the effects of time on human beings. (shrink)

This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the...

This paper raises two objections to Tyler Burge's externalist theory of privileged self-knowledge. The first point is that Burge owes us an account of external content-determining factors of our belief concept. The second point is that that Burge can reconcile externalism with self-knowledge only at the price of abandoning Frege's insight concerning the referential opacity of propositional attitudes.

In this article I seek to explain Hegel’s significance to contemporary meta-ethics, in particular to Kantian constructivism. I argue that in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit , Hegel shows that self-consciousness and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. This point, I argue, shows that there is no problem with taking other people’s reasons to motivate us since reflection on our aims is necessarily also reflection on the needs of those around us. I further explore Hegel’s contribution to (...) the debate about internal and external reasons. I end by arguing that we should understand reasons as historically constructed in the sense that who counts as an intrinsic bearer of value changes over time. I thus argue that the struggle for recognition is in fact the beginning of the long march toward the idea of recognition and the Kantian kingdom of ends. This march, however, is driven by the need to overcome injustice as it is instantiated at the beginning of history by the master’s absolute domination of the slave. (shrink)

The design and interpretation of self-experimentation need to be integrated with existing scientific knowledge. Otherwise observations on oneself cannot make a creative contribution to the advance of empirical understanding.

Kant offered a subtle theory of consciousness and self-knowledge which articulated the intuition that consciousness is a mode of being in a mental state, as opposed to a property of that state. This paper develops this theory and argues that McDowell's treatment of these issues in "Mind" and "World" overlooks the resources of Kant's views. McDowell conflates consciousness and self-consciousness, leading him to formulate too demanding a constraint on rational concept use. Kant's theory can be developed so as to avoid (...) this unfortunate corollary. The paper concludes by comparing Kant's account to contemporary approaches to the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

It is argued that at the center of Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness is the notion that experience is shaped by identification and sacrifice. Experience is the process of self - constitution and self -transformation of a self -conscious being that risks its own being. The transition from desire to recognition is explicated as a transition from the tripartite structure of want and fulfillment of biological desire to a socially structured recognition that is achieved only in reciprocal recognition, or reflexive recognition. (...) At the center of the Hegelian notion of selfhood is thus the realization that selves are the locus of accountatibility. To be a self, it is concluded, is to be the subject of normative statuses that refer to commitments; it means to be able to take a normative stand on things, to commit oneself and undertake responsibilities. Key Words: commitments • desire • experience • G.W.F.Hegel • identity • recognition • risk • sacrifice • self -consciousness • self - constitution. (shrink)

The article develops a suggestion of how cybersemiotics is pertinent to ecosemiotics. Cybersemiotics uses Luhmann's triadic view of autopoietic systems (biological, psychological, and socio-communicative autopoiesis) and adopts his approach to communication within a biosemiotic framework. The following levels of exosemiosis and signification can be identified under the consideration of nonintentional signs, cybernetics, and information theory: (1) the socio-communicative level of self-conscious signification and language games. (2) the instinctual and species specific level of sign stimuli signifying through innate release response mechanism (...) and sign games, and (3) the level of structural coupling, signal recognition, and languaging, where cybernetic feedback loops evince differences. Signification and communication levels arise whenever autopoietic systems interpenetrate (I) with the language system's semiotic and the psyche's phenosemiotic processes based on imaging, emotion, and volition and (2) between the psyche's phenosemiotic and the body's endosemiotic processes. It is at these two levels that we have the ecosemiotic signification processes of nonintentional signs in nature. Humans are linguistic cyborgs as animals are sign cyborgs because signs at different levels interpenetrate and form our embodied processes. Sign producing and interpreting capability has had selective influence on both animals and humans in evolution. (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)