Summary

Abstract

An initial goal of this book is to present an account of the first person, a kind of intentional content, and an account of the metaphysics of conscious subjects and to integrate the two accounts with one another. I then draw on these two accounts in addressing some classical issues about the first person and in characterizing the nature and significance of various kinds of self-consciousness. The first person notion features in the content of such mental events as seeing that something is coming towards one, having an action awareness of one’s raising one’s arm and remembering being at a particular concert. The first person notion is individuated by the principle that it refers, de jure , to the subject of any mental state or event in whose content it features. This distinguishes the first person from all other modes of presentation and determines its contribution to the correctness conditions of mental events and states in which it features. Subjects who self-represent have mental files on themselves, labelled with the first person notion, that can explain the capacity to grasp the first person notion.