‘Selfintimation’

Authors: Galen Strawson

Publish Date: 2013/10/04

Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-31

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Abstract

1 Aristotle Dignāga Descartes Arnauld Locke Brentano Sartre and many others are right about the nature of conscious awareness all such awareness comports—somehow carries within itself—awareness of itself 2 This is a necessary condition of awareness being awareness at all no ‘higherorder’ account of what makes conscious states conscious can be correct 3 But 2 is very paradoxical it seems to require that awareness be somehow already present in such a way as to be available to itself as object of awareness in order to be constituted as awareness in the first place 4 Can anything relate to itself in this way Can there be a relation that is i necessarily oneterm ii reflexive iii nonlogical nontrivial iv concretely realizable v dynamically real vi such that its holding is a necessary condition of the existence of the thing it holds of It helps to consider the thought this very thought is puzzling 5 Many accept the reality of the kind of awareness of awareness posited in 1 and 2 and think it must be not only ‘prereflective’ and ‘nonpositional’ but also irrelational or nonintentional But perhaps such awareness of awareness can be fully relational and fully intentional and can be legitimately said to be its own object or content even while being prereflective and nonpositional

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