Account Of Self-consciousness Research Articles

Subjective Validity, Self-Consciousness and Inner Experience: Comments on Kraus

AbstractI raise three related objections to aspects of Katharina Kraus’s interpretation in Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation. First, I reject her claim that representations count as merely subjectively valid for Kant if they represent objects from the contingent perspective of a particular subject. I argue that Kant in fact describes consciousness of subjectively valid representations as consciousness of one’s own perceptions rather than of the objects perceived, and therefore that it plays a bigger role in his account of self-consciousness than Kraus allows. Second, whereas Kraus argues that the transcendental unity of apperception structures the content of any consciousness that is possible for a subject, I note that Kant also allows for a merely empirical unity of apperception, which he describes as in principle different from transcendental unity. Finally, I raise some worries for Kraus’s suggestion that we can be aware of the activity of thinking through inner sense.

Expansion of Self-consciousness in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Abstract This paper is a novel attempt at reconstructing Kant’s account of self-consciousness in the first Critique by making evident its gradual expository progression, and at identifying the epistemic status of the two modes of self-consciousness: pure and empirical. I trace the gradual exposition of theoretical self-consciousness across three crucial parts of the book: the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. In doing so, I show that the account of theoretical self-consciousness is not presented to us all at once, but is progressively expanded and filled in. I also emphasize the importance of the distinction between the subject’s awareness of its existence, “Dasein”, and of its existence, “Existenz”. I conclude by discussing Kant’s preliminary remarks about practical self-consciousness in the Paralogisms, which bear an important relation to theoretical self-consciousness.

Two modes of givenness of pre-reflective self-consciousness

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 (2014). I will argue that Zahavi's “experiential self” is so thin that its connection with the pre-reflective dimension of selfhood at the distinctively human, conceptual, “space of reasons” level becomes problematic. Second, I shall suggest that an alternative account of self-consciousness first developed by Kant and refined by Sellars, which I shall call the “Kant-Sellars” thesis about self-consciousness, which stresses the distinction between sentient and sapient self-consciousness, can help us do justice to the insights contained in Zahavi's account of experiential self, while at the same time avoiding its more problematic features. Finally, I shall offer a brief response to the objection that by dropping the phenomenological “bridge” between the normative and empirical-material dimensions of the pre-reflective self, the above “Kant-Sellars” account of self-consciousness leaves us with an essentially bifurcated conception of pre-reflective self-consciousness. I will suggest that what unites those two dimensions of the pre-reflective self can be best described not as a phenomenological unity but rather as a “dialectical” normative-functional unity, whose ultimate raison d’être is practical in nature.

From Self-Attaching to Self-Emptying: An Investigation of Xuanzang’s Account of Self-Consciousness

Abstract In this paper, I investigate the account of self-consciousness provided by Chinese Yogācārins Xuanzang (602-664CE) and Kuiji (632-682CE). I will explain how they clarify the transition from selfattaching to self-emptying through the articulation of consciousness (vijñāna). Current scholarship often interprets the Yogācāra account of consciousness either as a science of mind or as a metaphysical idealism. Both interpretations are misleading, partly because they perpetuate various stereotypes about Buddhism, partly also because they overlook the religious goal of realizing in practice the wisdom of emptiness and the non-egoistic compassion. Against the status quo, I argue that through their account of self-consciousness, Xuanzang and Kuiji advocate what can be referred to as transcendental idealism that stresses the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity. Yogācārins thus neither nullify the existence of subjectivity nor formulate subjectivity as a higher entity. The transcendental idealism yields a Buddhist phenomenology that is similar to and also different from Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. In what follows I will first characterize Husserl’s phenomenology as an approach to consciousness at two levels (the descriptive level and the explicative level). Then, I elicit the Buddhist phenomenology from Yogācāra philosophy that is not only descriptive and explicative but also prescriptive. This three-level architectonic of consciousness, while reaffirming the importance of agency, further justifies the role of religious rituals and moral practices for Yogācāra devotees.

Searching for the Self: Early Phenomenological Accounts of Self-Consciousness from Lotze to Scheler

Phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness are often said to combine two elements by means of a necessary connection: the primitive and irreducible subjective character of experiences and the idealist transcendental constitution of consciousness. In what follows I argue that this connection is not necessary in order for an account of self-consciousness to be phenomenological, as shown by early phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness – particularly in Munich phenomenology. First of all, I show that the account of self-consciousness defended by these phenomenologists was not influenced as much by Husserl as by two important figures in the prehistory of phenomenology: their teacher Theodor Lipps, and – indirectly, through Lipps’ influence – Hermann Lotze. Second, I show that their account of self-consciousness takes the metaphysical realism underlying Lotze’s and Lipps’ views on the distinction between feeling and sensations seriously. I argue that this distinction played a central role in the development of many early phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness.

Hobbes and the Matter of Self-Consciousness

Observing that René Descartes’s dualistic philosophy haunts our conceptualization of matter, this essay argues that Thomas Hobbes develops a non-Cartesian materialism, which is to say that he articulates a materialism in which matter is not construed as essentially unthinking. Tracing his accounts of sense, perception, and thinking, this essay reconstructs Hobbes’s account of self-consciousness and proposes that in a subject conceived as wholly embodied, self-knowledge or self-awareness takes the form of memory. The essay elaborates how Hobbes’s account of self-consciousness as memory transforms our understanding both of the form taken by the subject’s self-mastery and of the relationship between the individual and the collective. It concludes by speculating about the implications of this account for our understanding of Hobbes’s theories of ethics and politics.

Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition

This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegel's account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an ‘ontological’ sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a ‘normative’ sense of recognition as embodied in rational social and political institutions. Drawing on recent work by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, I argue that Hegel's conception of rational freedom provides the key to grasping the relationship between the ontological and normative senses of recognition. Recognitive freedom provides a way of appropriating Hegel's theory of recognition for contemporary social philosophy.

Affectivity, Transparency, Rapport

At least scholars are recognizing that the great generative architectonics of idealism's account of self-consciousness would demand or imply, from a genealogical perspective, an unconscious. yet, between Foucaultian inspired analyses of madness in Hegel, and S. Zizek's Lacanian readings of the unconscious in the worls of Schelling, there has been essentially no mention of Fichte. As an attempt to redress this failure, I will begin to sketch Fichte's own unique articulation of an unconscious (Unbewusst) by highlighting three unique aspects or perspectives: (a) the idea of a pre-conscious, self-affective self; (b) the notion of the self-seeing eye; and (c) his own first hand involvement whith psychiatry's phenoman of magnetic rapport. This exposition of the unconscious in Fichte gas two distinct ends. First, it stands as one of the first sustained expositions of the unconscious in the work of Fichte. This analysis which places Fichte's work in the broader genealogy of dynamic psychiatry, however, also stands as a critique of the Freudian psychoanalytic model of the unconscious.

Subjects and Objects

Is it a necessary condition of self-consciousness that one conceives of oneself as a physical object? On one interpretation, what makes an object a physical object is its possession of primary qualities such as shape, solidity and location. On this interpretation, a physical object is, in essence, a bounded spaceoccupier, and to conceive of oneself as a physical object is to conceive of the subject of one's thoughts and experiences as shaped, spatio-temporally located, and solid. I will refer to the claim that conceiving of oneself as a physical object in this sense is a necessary condition of self-consciousness as the physical object requirement on self-consciousness. A familiar neo-Kantian argument for the physical object requirement is this: in order to make and understand a judgement about something one must have the capacity to discriminate the object of one's judgement from all other things, and so must know what kind of thing one's judgement is about.' Thus, when a person self-ascribes an experience using I, she must be able to discriminate that to which she ascribes the experience from all other things, and so must know what kind of thing she is. Ex hypothesi, that to which the experience is ascribed is a person, and persons are in fact physical objects among physical objects. So if a self-conscious subject must be able to self-ascribe at least some of her experiences, and the comprehending selfascription of experiences requires substantive knowledge of what one is, then self-consciousness requires the conception of the subject of one's experiences as a physical object among physical objects.2 One way of getting to grips with Campbell's account of self-consciousness would be to ask whether and how it differs from the neo-Kantian account. One question is whether Campbell accepts the physical object requirement. If he does, then another question concerns the relationship between his argument for this requirement and the neo-Kantian argument. In connection with the first of these questions, an immediate complication is that

The structure of human reflexion: the reflexional psychology of Vladimir Lefebvre

Contents: Key Words: Mathematical Psychology Reflexional Cognition Construct Theory Soviet/American Ethical Systems Conflict Resolution Quantum Theory Golden Secton Just Tuning Universum. Summary: A quasi-Platonic (gamma algebra) model of a quasi-Lockean (reflexional) model of human cognition a path breaking account of self consciousness and innate judgment protocols in, e.g., ethical, prudential, aesthetic and juridical systems. Lefebvre's model demonstrates how human cognition is possible why Marr and Geschwind processes are feasible and why a platonic Univiversum is a plausible implicate. There are no similar books.