In this paper I am going to argue that we should take actions to be prime. This will involve clarifying what it means to claim that actions are prime. I will consider Williamson's construal of actions as prime in a way that parallels his treatment of knowledge. I will argue that we need to be careful about treating our actions in the way suggested because of an internal relation between the success condition of an action and the action itself; a (...) parallel relation does not hold for most cases of knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of the self in a range of different traditions have positioned it outside the realm of ordinary worldly objects. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this seemingly widespread and persistent temptation to mystify the self is that the epistemic properties of I-thought are apt to give rise to an illusion of transcendence about their objects—that is, about ourselves.

Cartesians and Lichtenbergians have diverging views of the deliverances of introspection. According to the Cartesians, a rational subject, competent with the relevant concepts, can come to know that he or she thinks – hence, that he or she exists – on the sole basis of his or her introspective awareness of his or her conscious thinking. According to the Lichtenbergians, this is not possible. This paper offers a defence of the Lichtenbergian position using Peacocke and Campbell's recent exchange on Descartes'scogitoas (...) a framework for discussion. A thought-experiment will be presented involving two communities with radically different conceptions of the metaphysics of the self. The purpose of the thought-experiment is to suggest that a substantive metaphysical thesis, whose truth cannot be a priori known, is presupposed by any justified transition from one's introspective awareness of a certain mental activity to the self-ascription of that activity. (shrink)

Does self-consciousness entail objectivity, that the subject of self-consciousness is related to a mind-independent world? Anil Gomes, in his elegant and thought-provoking book, The Practical Self, gives a new and absorbing account - a contemporary “deduction” - of how objectivity follows from self-consciousness. According to Gomes, the self-conscious subject must assent to the claim that she, herself, is the agent of her thinking. Further this assent by the self-conscious subject is sustained by a relation to a community of subjects, also (...) agents, holding one another responsible for their thinking. Gomes's idea is that this relation to others is a relation to a mind-independent world. I do not argue against Gomes, but instead, pushing further in the same direction, argue that the self-conscious subject must also dissent from the claim that she herself is an object. I also ask about how Gomes's deduction amounts to a deduction of objectivity. Here I offer Gomes another way to think about objectivity and how his deduction of a relation between the self-conscious subject and a community of subjects constitutes a deduction of objectivity. (shrink)