Many people have thought that consciousness.

Recommends an approach to the philosophical problem about the existence and nature of the self in which the author models the problem of the self rather than attempting to model the self. It is suggested that the sense of the self is the source in experience of the philosophical problem of the self. The first question to ask is the phenomenological question: What is the nature of the sense of the self? But this, in the first instance, is best taken (...) as a question explicitly about human beings: as the local phenomenological question What is the nature of the human sense of the self? Whatever the answer to is, it raises the general phenomenological question Are there other possibilities when it comes to a sense of the self? The answers to and raise the conditions question What are the grounds or preconditions of possession of a sense of the self? and this question raises a battery of subsidiary questions. If one can produce satisfactory answers to,, and, one will be in a good position to raise and answer the factual question, the fundamental and straightforward metaphysical question is there such a thing as the self? 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

What is the self? Does it exist? If it does exist, what is it like? It's not clear that we even know what we're asking about when we ask these large, metaphysical questions. The idea of the self comes very naturally to us, and it seems rather important, but it's also extremely puzzling. As for the word "self"--it's been taken in so many different ways that it seems that you can mean more or less what you like by it and (...) come up with almost any answer. Galen Strawson proposes to approach the (seeming) problem of the self by starting from the thing that makes it seem there is a problem in the first place: our experience of the self, our experience of having or being a self, a hidden, inner mental presence or locus of consciousness. He argues that we should consider the phenomenology (experience) of the self before we attempt its metaphysics (its existence and nature). And when we have considered what it's like for human beings (assuming we can generalize about ourselves), we need to consider what it might be like for other possible creatures: what's the very least that might count as experience of oneself as a self? This, he proposes, will give us a good idea of what we ought to be looking for when we go on to ask whether there is such a thing-an idea worth following wherever it leads. It leads Strawson to conclude that selves, inner subjects of experience, do indeed exist. But they bear little resemblance to traditional conceptions of the self. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to take up three closely connected questions. First, does consciousness essentially involve subjectivity? Second, what is the connection, if any, between pre-reflective self-consciousness and subjectivity? And, third, does consciousness necessarily involve an ego or self? I will draw on the Yogācāra–Madhyamaka synthesis of Śāntarakṣita to develop an account of the relation between consciousness, subjectivity, and the self. I will argue, first, that phenomenal consciousness is reflexive or self-illuminating. Second, I will argue that consciousness necessarily (...) involves minimal subjectivity. Third, I will argue that neither the reflexivity nor the subjectivity of consciousness implies that there is any entity such as the self or ego over and above reflexive consciousness. Fourth, I will argue that what we normally think of as ‘the self’ is best understood as a complex, multi-layered process that emerges within the pre.. (shrink)

Carruthers offers a refreshing piece of “substantive philosophy.” Going beyond the limitations of pure analysis, he adopts a methodology which is one part analysis, one part empirical data, and a heavy dose of inference to the best explanation. The overarching goal is to advance the commonsense—yet unfashionable—thesis that natural language is the primary medium of thought, and to defend the related cognitive conception of NL. In particular, Carruthers argues that imaginative phonological representations of “inner speech” are constitutive of conscious thoughts, (...) and that thinking involves operations on such symbols. While there is still a role for mentalese cognition, such thinking is always unconscious, and probably of limited innate conceptual resources. The weak thesis is that, of natural necessity, all conscious propositional thought requires NL. The strong thesis is that, of natural necessity, distinctively human thoughts can only be tokened in natural language—hence even much of our unconscious thinking occurs in English. (shrink)

Buddhist theories of mind pivot between two distinct interpretative strands: an epistemological tradition in which the mind, or the mental, is the foundation for valid knowledge and a tradition of deconstruction, in which there is no privileged vantage point for truth claims. The contested status of these two strands is evident in the debates surrounding the relationship between epistemology and Madhyamaka that extend from India to Tibet. The paper will focus on two exemplars of these approaches in Tibet, those of (...) Śākya Chokden and Tsongkhapa. (shrink)