Relocating the figure of Jikaku (Self-Consciousness) in Nishida’s Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness.

This essay by Nishida Kitarō from 1927, translated into English here for the first time, is from the initial period of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku), when Nishida was first developing his conception of “place” (basho). Nishida here inquires into the relationship between logic and consciousness in terms of place and implacement in order to overcome the shortcomings of previous philosophical attempts—from the ancient Greeks to the moderns—to dualistically conceive the (...) relationship between being and knowing in terms of subject-object or form-matter. During the course of articulating his novel approach to consciousness and cognition, Nishida discusses what he takes to be the weaknesses of Greek hylomorphism, Kantian (and neo-Kantian) dualism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Dissatisfied with the attribution of mere passivity to placiality, and turning away from consciousness objectified as a subject of statement, Nishida imparts to consciousness qua place a certain logical independence as an active yet un-objectifiable “predicate.” This investigation of consciousness as the unobjectifiable place for objectification leads Nishida to the notion of what precedes consciousness itself, a “place of nothing” (mu no basho) that envelops the dichotomized structures of subject-predicate, being-nothing, subject-object, universal-particular, et cetera. (shrink)

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own (...) admitted limitation to the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

The following essay, “The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness” (Torinokosaretaru ishiki no mondai 取残されたる意識の問題), by Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 from 1927 is significant in regard to the development of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku 西田哲学). In what follows, in addition to providing some commentary on the important points of his essay, I would like to show its relevance or significance not only for those who would like to study Nishida’s thought but also for (...) philosophy in general, especially in the contemporary setting. It was first published in 1927 by Iwanami Publishers in a collection of essays by different authors, Philosophical Essays in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Birthday of Dr. .. (shrink)

This chapter will explicate what Nishida means by “nothing” (mu, 無), as well as “being” (yū, 有), through an exposition of his concept of the “place of nothing” (mu no basho). We do so through an investigation of his exposition of “the place of nothing” vis-àvis the self, the world, and God, as it shows up in his epistemology, metaphysics, theology and religious ethics during the various periods of his oeuvre – in other words, his understanding of (...) nothingness that he takes to be the root of the self, the world, and the religious notion of an absolute or God. We will also indicate some of the sources of his notion from the Eastern and the Western traditions. What unites his view to nothing from the different periods is an existential praxis, and what I call an “anontology” that avoids reduction to either opposites of being and non-being (on-mēon). (shrink)

Although we cannot find any Aesthetics system in the works of NISHIDA Kitarõ (1870-1945), the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth-century, one of his central themes is the role of art and aesthetics in relation with morality and religion. His aesthetics approaches are magnificent examples of his aim to overcome the innate dualism that sustains modern epistemology and a door, apparently hidden, to a better understanding of all his speculative scheme of philosophy. This paper attempts (...) to throw light to the importance of the first aesthetic approximation developed by Nishida eleven years before the publication of Zen no Kenkyû [ 善 の?究 ] (An Inquiry into the Good) (1911) and twenty-three years before the publication of the more accurate system of aesthetics that we read in Geijutsu to dôtoku [芸術 と 道? ] (Art and Morality) (1923). We will analyze the small essay entitled "Bi no Setsumei" [美 の?明] ("An explanation of Beauty") (1900) and Nishida's first definition of beauty as muga [無我] (self-effacement or ecstasy). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate Nishida Kitarō’s way of philosophizing in the light of the concept of “transition” in order to deepen our understanding of both Nishida’s philosophy and our thinking about and in transitions, using the concept of “boundary” or “border” (Grenze) as a catalyst. For that purpose, we focus on Nishida’s essay “Place” (「場所」), passing through different parts of the text as if through successive gates on a path of transition between one (...) place and the next, until we reach the final place of “absolute nothingness.” Dwelling on this place, we turn our attention to its internal structure and try to depict it along the outlines of a boundary, following the movements taking place in Nishida’s essay. The second part proposes an interpretation of the place of nothingness as an interminable practice of boundary-crossing that doesn’t come to a halt in a final, all-encompassing place, but dynamically situates itself on countless intersecting planes. After a more or less abstract analysis of the concept of “boundary,” we will apply and concretize this approach by using the example of the skin. To this end, we expose five main features of the skin as boundary: permeability, enclosure, excessiveness, interstitiality and reciprocal self-formation. (shrink)

Philosophers investigating the experiences of the dancing subject (Sheets-Johnstone 1980, 2009, 2011, 2012; Parviainen 1998; Legrand 2007, 2013; Legrand & Ravn 2009; Montero 2013; Foultier & Roos 2013) unearth vast variations of embodied consciousness and cognition in performing body experts. The traditional phenomenological literature provides us with descriptions and definitions of reflective self-consciousness as well as of pre-reflective bodily absorption, but when it comes to the states of self-consciousness dance philosophers refer to as thinking in movement and a (...) form of reflective consciousness at a bodily level – as well as to dancers’ re- ported experiences of being in a trance and yet hyper-aware – we are challenged in terms of terminology and precise descriptions. After empirical research on dancers’ experiences and studies of the above-mentioned philosophies of dance, aligning this material with Husserl, Zahavi and other phenomenologists’ descriptions of reflection and embodied self-consciousness, I find it plausible to acknowledge the existence of a third form of self- consciousness: embodied reflection, a reflective process experienced through and with the embodied and/or emotional self. In this article I aspire to capture the characteristics of this transcendence of the bodily self. (shrink)

It is pretty obvious to most of us that self-consciousness is a product of evolution. But its nature is unknown. We propose here a scenario addressing a possible evolutionary nature of self-consciousness covering the segment linking pre-human primates to humans. The scenario is based on evolutions of representations and of inter-subjectivity that could have taken place within the minds of our pre-human ancestors . We begin by situating self-consciousness relatively to other aspects of human consciousness. With the (...) help of anthropology, we date a possible starting point of our scenario at a time when our non self-conscious pre-human ancestors were able to build meaningful representations and were capable of inter-subjectivity, like are our today modern apes. As the proposed scenario is based on an evolution of representations, we recall an existing model for meaningful representations based on the generation of meaningful information by systems submitted to internal constraints. This model allows us to define representations of conspecifics and auto-representations that we assume as having been present in the minds of our pre-human ancestors. The next step of the scenario is to consider an evolution of inter-subjectivity towards identification with conspecifics that could have led to a merger of the auto-representation with the representations of conspecifics in the minds of our ancestors. Such a merger brought the auto-representation to become about an entity existing in the environment, as were the representations of conspecifics. We consider that such identification with conspecifics has introduced in the mind of our ancestors an elementary and embryonic sense of being an existing entity that we name ‘ancestral self-consciousness’. The same process has also imposed to our ancestors an identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics which has produced an important anxiety increase that could have blocked the evolutionary process. We propose that the performances developed by our ancestors to manage that anxiety increase have also generated significant evolutionary advantages that have helped the development of ancestral self-consciousness and favored its evolution toward our full-fledged self-consciousness. It is also proposed that some pre-human primates have avoided the anxiety increase by finding a niche where evolutionary advantages were not necessary. This may have led to our today apes. The contribution of anxiety to the proposed scenario brings to position anxiety management as having guided the evolution of self-consciousness and as still being a key player in our today human minds. Regarding philosophy of mind, possible links between phenomenal consciousness and the proposed nature of self-consciousness are introduced. The conclusion presents a summary of the points addressed here. Possible continuations are highlighted as related to human mind, to anxiety management and to artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Anxiety is a main contributor to human psychological sufferings. Its evolutionary sources are generally related to alert signals for coping with adverse or unexpected situations [Steiner, 2002] or to hunter-gatherer emotions mismatched with today environments [Horwitz & Wakefield, 2012]. We propose here another evolutionary perspective that links human anxiety to an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness. That approach introduces new relations between mental health and human mind. The proposed evolutionary scenario starts with the performance of primate identification with conspecifics [de (...) Waal 1998, 2008]. It is assumed that the evolution of that identification brought our ancestors to represent themselves as entities existing in the environment, like conspecifics were represented as existing in the environment. We consider that this process has implemented in the mind of our ancestors some first elements of self-consciousness [Menant 2014a]. But the same process has also produced new sufferings coming from identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics. In addition, the emerging performance of self-focus brought in the new feeling of being a suffering entity. We consider that all these new sufferings have created in the mind of our primate ancestors a huge anxiety increase, unbearable if not limited. Among the options available to limit that anxiety increase we focus on two of them that may have taken place. The first was a withdrawal from the process. Some primates may have simply rejected the evolution of identification (and with it self-consciousness). This may have led them to an ecological niche resulting in our today great apes. The second option was about limiting the causes of sufferings and taking advantage of possible resulting evolutionary benefits. This may have been achieved by developing performances like imitation, communication, simulation, synergy and ToM. Added to a positive feedback on identification these performances may have initiated an evolutionary engine that has accelerated the evolution toward human self-consciousness. That option is characterized by an early build up of anxiety limitation processes in an evolutionary nature of our human self-consciousness. This option corresponds to a human specificity and introduces anxiety management and self-consciousness as sharing a same evolutionary story. The build up of these anxiety management processes is now buried in the evolutiony story of our human mind. But these processes are still present in our minds at an unconscious level and participate to many of our human mental states and behaviors. Such positioning of anxiety management as part of the nature of human mind is new and makes available entry points for new understandings of human emotion, motivations and mental disorders. The proposed evolutionary scenario has been introduced in philosophy of mind [Menant 2011, 2014a, b] but it has not been so far explicitly part of primatology nor of psychology/psychiatry/ethics. We present here a drawing of the scenario with highlights on corresponding key points. More work is needed on these new evolutionary links between human mind and anxiety management. References: de Waal, F B.M. (1998). No imitation without identification. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1998) 21:89. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/deWaal_98.html de Waal, F B.M. (2008). Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008, 59. http://www.life.umd.edu/faculty/wilkinson/BIOL608W/deWaalAnnRevPsych2008.pdf Horwitz, A. V. and Wakefield, J. C. (2012). All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders. Oxford Univ. Press. 2012. Menant, C. (2011). Computation on Information, Meaning and Representations. An Evolutionary Approach. https://philpapers.org/rec/MENCOI Menant, C. (2014a). Proposal for an evolutionary approach to self-consciousness. https://philpapers.org/rec/MENPFA-3 Menant, C. (2014b). Consciousness of oneself as object and as subject. Proposal for an evolutionary approach. https://philpapers.org/rec/MENCOO Steiner, T. (2002). The biology of fear- and anxiety-related behaviors. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2002 Sep; 4(3): 231–249. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181681/. (shrink)

This book offers the first comprehensive collection of essays on the key concepts of Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945), the father of modern Japanese philosophy and founder of the Kyoto School. The essays analyze several of the major philosophical concepts in Nishida, including pure experience, absolute will, place, and acting intuition. They examine the meaning and positioning of Nishida’s philosophy in the history of philosophy, as well as in the contemporary world, and discuss the relevance of his philosophy (...) in the present context. The book next looks at the significance of Nishida’s philosophy in the wider contexts of science, arts, and religion. The book includes a glossary of key terms that have been translated in a unified manner throughout the volume. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to bring some conceptual clarity to several key terms and foundational claims that make up Levinas's body-based conception of ethics. Additionally, I explore ways that Levinas's arguments about the somatic basis of subjectivity and ethical relatedness receive support from recent empirical research. The paper proceeds in this way: First, I clarify Levinas's use of the terms “sensibility”, “subjectivity”, and “proximity” in Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence . Next, I argue for an interpretation of (...) Levinas's thought that I suggest is buttressed by recent experimental work in both developmental psychology and neuroscience. I provide examples of research that I suggest opens up Levinas's phenomenological analysis in new and interesting ways. I also urge the importance of Levinas's phenomenological analysis in contextualizing the ethical significance of these empirical findings. (shrink)

Original title : 「歴史的身体」『西田幾多郎全集』[Nishida Kitarō Gesamtausgabe], 3. Auflage, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, Bd. 14: 265–92.

Originally published as「歴史的世界の個性的な自己創造と国家：西田哲学における〈国家〉と〈民族〉」, in「西田哲学会年報第七号」[ Jahrbuch der Nishida-Gesellschaft] 7 : 55–76. Übersetzt von Leon Krings. In diesem Aufsatz wird der Frage nachgegangen, in welcher Weise der „Staat“ im späten Denken des Philosophen Nishida Kitarō thematisiert wird. Dies geschieht anhand der Staatstheorie Nishidas, wie sie sich in seinen Aufsätzen Das Problem der Staatsraison und Das Problem der japanischen Kultur sowie im Anhang zur Philosophischen Aufsatzsammlung iv darstellt. Zusätzlich werden Nishidas Schriften, die nach den Grundproblemen der Philosophie geschrieben wurden und den (...) theoretischen Hintergrund seiner Staatstheorie bilden, miteinbezogen. In diesen Schriften fragt Nishida – ausgehend von der genetischen Struktur der historischen Wirklichkeit – nach der Daseinsberechtigung sowie der Bedeutung des Staates, d. h. danach, was ein Staat ist und welche Art von Gemeinschaft es verdient, als „Staat“ bezeichnet zu werden. Mithilfe des im Folgenden dargestellten Leitfadens werde ich versuchen, Nishidas Gedankengang genauer nachzuverfolgen. Dabei wird sich zeigen, dass er den „Staat“ als eine im höchsten Maße paradoxe Form der Gemeinschaft interpretiert. (shrink)

The image of the “mirror” (鏡kagami) appears frequently in the philosophical texts of Nishida Kitaro (西田幾多郎1870-1945), where it assumes various functions. Mirror references first occur in meditations on the philosophies of Josiah Royce (1855-1916) and Henri Bergson (1859-1941). The most fascinating evocation here corresponds to the idea of a “self-enlightening mirror”, used to probe the philosophical ground for self-illumination. This idea seems to point back to Buddhist meaning that intervenes in Japanese intellectual history. We take this (...) as our warrant for establishing here, firstly, how Nishidean philosophical speculation can be critically related to the thought of Dogen (道元1200-1253); and, secondly, in what sense it has stimulated some contemporary approaches in Japanese philosophy (for example, those of Nitta, Ohashi, and Sakabe). (shrink)

The paper aims at analyzing the inner development of self-identity from its pre-reflective level to the full awareness one. The recent findings of neurosciences and cognitive studies suggest focusing attention on the complex relation between self as consciousness and self as subjectivity, both with regard to their interdependency and to their reference to a shared context. Phenomenology, thanks to the careful consideration of the issues regarding the constitution of mental life articulated by its classic researches and current (...) inquires, offers a valuable opportunity to set the scientific outcomes in an authentically philosophical perspective. (shrink)

I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any (...) conscious process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness. (shrink)

This article explores the potential of Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy of subjectivity as objectivity as a grounding for value sensitive design (VSD) and the design turn in applied ethics. The rapid pace of scientific and technological advancement has created a gap between technical abilities and our moral assessments of those abilities, calling for a reflection on the philosophical tools we have for applying ethics. In particular, applied ethics often presents interconnected problems that require a more general framework for (...) ethical reflection. Lonergan’s philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of selfunderstanding and self‐transcendence in achieving objectivity, can provide a valuable perspective on VSD and the design turn in applied ethics. The article examines how Lonergan’s philosophy can be applied to VSD and the design turn, and how scientific knowledge can be integrated into an ethics of science without reducing it to an external reflection. By adopting Lonergan’s perspective, we can address the ethical challenges arising from scientific and technological advancements while promoting a more holistic approach to applied ethics. (shrink)

Original title: 「生の哲學について」『西田幾多郎全集』旧版 [Alte Ausgabe: Gesammelte Werke Nishida Kitarōs]. Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1978, 6: 428–51; 新版 [Neue Ausgabe]. Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 2009, 5: 335–53.

A review of Simon Lumsden's book on self consciousness in Hegel and in Postmodern authors.

The claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness has a long philosophical history, and has received renewed support in recent years. My aim in this paper is to argue that this surprisingly enduring idea is misleading at best, and insufficiently supported at worst. I start by offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish two notions of self-consciousness: consciousness of oneself and consciousness of one’s experience. While (...) “self-consciousness” is often taken to refer to the former notion, the most common variant of the constitutive claim, on which I focus here, targets the latter. This claim can be further interpreted in two ways: on a deflationary reading, it falls within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on an inflationary reading, it points to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary reading of the constitutive claim is plausible, but should be formulated without using a term as polysemous and suggestive as “self-consciousness”; by contrast, the inflationary reading is not adequately supported, and ultimately rests on contentious intuitions about phenomenology. I conclude that we should abandon the idea that self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness. (shrink)

This paper discusses two approaches of the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The Husserlian one, a transcendental phenomenological investigation of the possibility of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and the Waldenfelsian one, an ethical phenomenological investigation of day to day intersubjective interactions. Both authors pretend to give account of the conditions of possibility of intersubjective interaction. However, Husserl starts with the investigation of the transcendental structure of subjectivity, that is, the fundamental conditions required for the appearance of consciousness. By contrast, Waldenfels looks (...) first at practical interaction and draws conclusions on the deeper structure of subjectivity based on the traces he discovers to be characteristic for this interaction. Our interest lies in determining which of the two approaches should be given priority for the investigation of the constitution of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

We all agree that our human minds are results of primate evolution. We humans are self conscious. The separation of our human lineage from the chimpanzee one began about 7MY ago (pan homo split). Specificities of human self consciousness have been created during that time. Besides interesting approaches differing from the one proposed here [1], little is known about how these specificities came up [2, 3]. We propose here to address that subject with an evolutionary scenario using meaningful (...) representations, identifications with conspecifics and anxiety management. Taking the beginning of the pan-homo split as a starting point we look at how an evolutionary scenario could have led to our present human self consciousness as object and as subject. An evolutionary anxiety is highlighted as having been a key contributor to the evolutionary scenario with perspectives on a possible future of self consciousness. Human self consciousness is defined here as the meaningful representation of one’s own entity, with the capability to think and talk about it. The evolutionary scenario proposed here is an extension of a previous version [11] that uses an evolution of meaningful representations introduced in previous works [8]. The scenario starts with two types of meaningful representations carried by our non self-conscious pre-human ancestors: representations of parts of themselves (seen hands, heard shouting, actions, …) and representations of conspecifics as entities existing in the environment. The next step uses elementary versions of inter-subjectivity and of identifications with conspecifics that our primate ancestors were capable of. It is proposed that these performances have brought the two types of representations to merge and bring our ancestors to progressively represent their own entity as existing in the environment like conspecifics were represented. We consider such evolutionary approach as introducing an elementary form of self consciousness as object and a s subject, both coming in together. We group them into an “ancestral self consciousness” which was to evolve into our human self consciousness [4]. Such approach avoids the need of a pre-reflective self consciousness [7]. The scenario considers that such identifications took place also with suffering or dying conspecifics. These identifications were sources of specific new fears and anxieties that the scenario groups in an “evolutionary anxiety”, source of important mental sufferings that our ancestors had to limit. Different possibilities were available for that. The scenario proposes that the chimpanzee lineage may have limited what was an unbearable mental suffering by stopping the development of identifications with conspecifics, and by this also stopping a possible evolution toward self-consciousness. This would have led to today chimpanzees. On the other side, our human lineage may have developed anxiety limitation tools like caring, pleasure, anticipation, communication and imitation; such tools also favoring the evolution of our lineage toward human minds . This is illustrated in the scenario by the introduction of an ”evolutionary engine”. In addition, the capacity for anticipation attached to self consciousness has amplified the evolutionary anxiety, leading it to become an overall “ancestral anxiety” which is still present and active in our human minds (with anxiety limitations as a key constraints to satisfy). The many anxiety limitation processes introduced in our lineage during the pan homo split were interrelated. Many came up in addition to the few ones listed here above. Most remain in our human minds at an unconscious level and are active in our everyday lives, much more than assumed so far. Considering a possible future of human self consciousness, nothing tells that human evolution is terminated. Also, the evolutionary scenario introduces the possibility for some anxiety limitation processes to be sources of evil behaviors, more precisely related to a possible pleasure procured by the suffering of others [9]. That (disturbing) background could introduce a better understanding of human mind, and so be an entry point to its future in terms of potential improvements of human nature. The scenario also introduces an evolutionary nature of reflectivity [10] which can question the philosophical need for a pre-reflective self consciousness. Such perspective can also introduce a naturalization of introspection, and then allow to consciously question the nature and content of our mental states. This could open a path for a tentative naturalization of the “what it is like” question for humans and make available an evolutionary link between self consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. A last point to highlight is that the proposed evolutionary scenario uses performances of life like intersubjectivity. This brings to note that a full understanding of the proposed scenario needs an understanding about the nature of life which is not available today. A lot remains to be done on these subjects. Continuations are introduced. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker, developing an idea of Wittgenstein’s, argues that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. Although we might be liable to error when “I” (or its cognates) is used as an object, we are immune to error when “I” is used as a subject (as when one says, “I have a toothache”). Shoemaker claims that the relationship between “I” as-subject and the mental states of which it is introspectively aware is tautological: when, say, we (...) judge that “I feel pain,” we are tautologically aware that feels pain is instantiated and that it is instantiated in oneself. Moreover, he contends that this relationship holds not just for bodily sensations, but also for the sense of agency and for visual perception. But we deny that this relationship is tautological; instead, we treat Shoemaker’s principle (IEM) as a hypothesis. We then proceed to show that certain pathological states and experimentally-induced illusions can be adduced to show that IEM describes not a necessary relationship but a contingent relationship, one that sometimes fails to obtain. That we are not immune to error in the way Shoemaker describes has grave consequences for many aspects of his ideas concerning the first-person perspective. In the course of arguing that these empirical phenomena count against IEM, we also show that not only can the content of conscious experience be misrepresented, so too can the subject: that is, not only can the what of conscious experience be misrepresented, so too can the who. (shrink)

The paper will explicate the Sache or matter of the dialectic of the founder of Kyoto School philosophy, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), from the standpoint of his mature thought, especially from the 1930s and 40s. Rather than providing a simple exposition of his thought I will engage in a creative reading of his concept of basho (place) in terms of chiasma and chōra, or a chiasmatic chōra. I argue that Nishida’s appropriation of nineteenth century German, especially Hegelian, terminology was (...) inadequate in expressing what he strove to say—for his concept of basho confounds traditional metaphysical discourse. Because of its chiasmatic and chōratic nature, the Sache he strove to capture and express through the language of dialectical philosophy, perpetually slips away from any systemic bounds. His “dialectic” (benshōhō) implies a chiasma or a criss-crossing of multiple factors on multi-dimensional levels that exceed in complexity simplistic binomial oppositions or the triadic formula of traditional dialectics. The complexity is one of over-determination that threatens to undermine the very language of such a dialectic. As the deep complexity of over-inter-determinations would deconstruct any notion of a substance, what Nishida offers—as opposed to an ousiology (or logic of substance)—is a chiasmology. I thus argue that his so-called dialectic is really an unfolding of that chiasma. And if chiasma expresses the over-determinate aspect of Nishida’s matter of thinking, chōra would express its under-determinate aspect. Nishida himself based his concept of basho or “place” on Plato’s notion of the chōra from the Timaeus. I take Nishida’s basho in its chōratic nature as what simultaneously unfolds and enfolds the chiasma. But in the case of the chōra it is its under-determinate nature that refuses reduction to any of the terms of opposition. In its self-withdrawal, it provides a clearing, a space, for the chiasmatic unraveling of the many. Like the chiasma it undermines any claim to a first substance or the hegemony of a universal First. For in its indeterminateness, it is “nothing” (mu). The unfolding it enfolds is, as Nishida states, “a determination without determiner.” In concrete terms, however, we might develop Nishida’s concept further by returning to the original pre-Platonic Greek meaning of chōra in the sense of “region” or “country,” to understand chōra or basho here as the very space of co-existence provided by this very earth. As a chiasmatic chōra irreducible, in its over- and under-determinations, to being or non-being, Nishida’s basho qua mu proves to be the an-ontological origin of both on and meon (being and non-being). Rejecting the culture-nature dichotomy this notion of our place of being as chiasma and chōra underscores our holistic symbiosis with the earth as the anontological (un)ground and clearing for our co-existence in a concrete milieau with one another and with nature. It is this earth as our ultimate contextual wherein that provides a clearing for co-dwelling and mutual encounter with one’s other, that we must acknowledge today if we are to co-exist authentically and freely vis-à-vis our global neighbors and vis-à-vis the surrounding nature. (shrink)

The performance of reflectivity of self-consciousness is traditionally associated to the subject turning its consciousness of objects to its own entity. But such process introduces concerns of circularity and of infinite regress. To avoid them philosophers have postulated a “pre-reflective self-consciousness” understood as a “state of consciousness that is immediately aware of itself, unmediated by reflections”. We propose here that an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness can introduce reflectivity as a natural performance, bringing pre-reflective self-consciousness to be (...) reconsidered. The evolutionary scenario starts when our ancestors were capable to manage representations while also being able to partly identify with their conspecifics represented as existing in the environment. These identifications have allowed our ancestors to merge the representations they had of parts of themselves with the corresponding representations they had of their conspecifics. These mergers have progressively led our ancestors to begin representing themselves as entities existing in the environment, like conspecifics were represented. Such process has produced an elementary reflectivity and has provided our ancestors with an "ancestral self-consciousness". And thinking about the represented entity has led our ancestors to self-consciousness as object and as subject. Reflectivity can then be considered as a natural performance of self-consciousness. And postulating a pre-reflective self-consciousness may need to be re-addressed. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate Kitarō Nishida's characterization of what he refers to as the 'self-contradictory' body. First, I clarify the conceptual relation between the self-contradictory body and Nishida's notion of 'acting-intuition'. I next look at Nishida's analysis of acting-intuition and the self-contradictory body as it pertains to our personal, sensorimotor engagement with the world and things in it, as well as to our bodily immersion within the intersubjective and social world. Along the way, (...) I argue that Nishida develops a rich and exceedingly current way of thinking through different facets of embodiment and interpersonal relatedness. I further argue that Nishida's work provides compelling reasons to foreground the mutually implicative, co-emergent nature of embodied self and world in our theorizing about the nature of self and experience. (shrink)

This chapter pursues the question of naturalism in the context of non-Western philosophical contributions to ethics and philosophy of mind: First, what conception of naturalism, if any, is best suited to capture the scope of Buddhist Reductionism? Second, can such a conception still accommodate the distinctive features of phenomenal consciousness (e.g., subjectivity, intentionality, first-person givenness, etc.). The first section reviews dominant conceptions of naturalism, and their applicability to the Buddhist project. In the second section, the author provides an example (...) of problematic issues more stringent conceptions of naturalism under the guise of neurophysicalism confront, and evaluate Flanagan’s response to these issues. The third section considers briefly the reflexivity thesis (the thesis that consciousness consists in conscious mental states being implicitly self-aware), specifically as articulated by Dignaga, Dharmakirti and their followers, and uses this thesis to articulate a conception of minimal agency as mineness that, the author argues, further challenges Flanagan’s neurophysicalism stance and his compatibilist account of moral agency. The paper concludes, in the fourth section, by suggesting a way in which no-ownership conceptions of reflexive self-consciousness can help us both to get the structure of phenomenal consciousness right and to ground our conceptions of agency, intentionality, and moral responsibility. (shrink)

How can we figure out what’s right or wrong, if moral truths are neither self-evident nor something we can perceive? Very roughly, the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) says that we should begin moral inquiry from what we already confidently think, seeking to find a a match between our initial convictions and general principles that are well-supported by background theories, mutually adjusting both until we reach a coherent outlook in which our beliefs are in harmony (the equilibrium part) and (...) we know why and how they support each other (the reflective part). It has been central to the self-understanding of normative ethics and other branches of philosophy in the last half a century. In this chapter, we examine the history of the idea of RE and introduce a schema for generating 256 variants. We explain why RE is subject to serious objections insofar as it purports to yield epistemic justification in virtue of achieving coherence. However, we also develop a new argument to the effect that RE is the best feasible method for us to achieve moral understanding and the ability to justify our judgments to others. It may thus be crucial for responsible moral inquiry, even if coherence among considered judgments and principles is neither sufficient nor necessary for justified moral belief. (shrink)

This paper argues that the many and various conceptions of consciousness propounded by cognitive scientists and philosophers can all be understood as constituted with reference to four fundamental sorts of criterion: epistemic (concerned with kinds of consciousness), semantic (dealing with orders of consciousness), physiological (reflecting states of consciousness), and pragmatic (seeking to capture types of consciousness). The resulting four-fold taxonomy, intended to be exhaustive, suggests that all of the distinct varieties of consciousness currently encountered in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of (...) mind, clinical psychology, and other related fields ultimately refer to a unified natural process, analysed under four general aspects. The proposed taxonomy will, it is hoped, possess sufficient clarity to serve as a sound theoretical framework for further scientific studies, and to count as a significant step in the direction of a properly formulated unified concept of consciousness. (shrink)

Nietzsche's thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical community as well as to philosophers of a more phenomenological and hermeneutic background. The volume aims to appeal to both communities of scholars as it seeks to deepen the growing interest and appreciation of Nietzsche's contribution to our understanding of the mind. The 16 essays by leading Nietzsche scholars examine Nietzsche's understanding of consciousness and investigate its continuities with current developments in philosophy of mind, neuroscience, neuroethics, psychology, (...) linguistics, and metaphysics. Recent work in philosophy of mind emphasises non-reductive approaches to consciousness and self-consciousness. The mental is understood as always already embodied as well as situated or embedded in and emerging from a complex system. Nietzsche's thoroughly naturalistic philosophy has received renewed attention as it challenges any reductivist attempt to understand the mental exclusively as a physical phenomenon using the methods of the natural sciences. His understanding of nature and the physical, informed by but not reducible to the natural sciences of his time, is highly idiosyncratic. It posits the mental at several levels, from unconscious and proto-conscious drives, affects and emotions, to reflective, higher-order conscious states, intentionality and language. (shrink)

Self-consciousness relates to important themes, such as sentience and personhood, and is often the cornerstone of moral theories (Warren, 1997). However, not much attention is given to future moral creatures of the earth: robots. This may be due to the unsettled status of their experience, which is why I have chosen to find the necessary features of self-consciousness in them. Philosophy of mind is also my interest which I have developed since I rejected the idea of souls and (...) could not account for my own phenomenal experiences. Among the current answers to the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) one stood out to me – Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness presented in “Consciousness Explained” (Dennett, 1991) and his other works. Daniel Dennett is a self-described illusionist (Dennett, 2016) and a functionalist. His position is synonymous to holding self-conscious experiences, such as deliberating over one’s pain or reflecting over one’s actions insufficient to postulate existence of a metaphysical self. He believes instead that experiences are functional realizations which do not require any self, and the feeling of being conscious or self-conscious is actually a ”user-illusion” (Dennett, 1991), a term describing the unjustified belief of being in control of one’s actions. In his views, a selfhood as it is popularly conceived is contradictory. Therefore, he rejects realism about mental events, a position also called naïve realism (Siegel, 2011), on the basis that it is unverifiable and there are insufficient grounds to accept mental events (Dennett, 1988). He adopts a similar scepticism towards other theories of minds, hence nearing eliminative materialism in self-consciousness and related theme of pain (Dennett, 1978). His multiple drafts model of consciousness seeks to ground our beliefs about self-consciousness in the specific architecture of mind, which is particular to every species and kind of being. As such it is a particularly flexible theory that examines experiences of non-humans without falling into binary thinking – believing that a being has as rich inner life as humans do or none. This is why it is a great starting point for establishing necessary conditions for consciousness in robots. In this essay, I will often use words computer, programme, robot interchangeably for the purpose of clarity and take as the working definition “autonomous machines capable of sensing their environment, making decision and performing tasks similar to human actions”. I chose to explore self-consciousness instead of committing to the issue of consciousness, because consciousness can be defined in a weak sense, in which even a thermostat is “conscious” of the temperature, and consciousness in a strong sense, which invokes the internalism and externalism debate that is less connected to the nature of experiences than self-consciousness. My exploration pertains first and foremost to the philosophy of mind, of which I will examine the most relevant positions and decide to commit to functionalism (Block, 1980). Then I will advocate for explaining away of some of phenomena of self-consciousness and believing self-consciousness to be a sort of illusion. From there I will conclude that robots could fall for the same illusion of self-consciousness and therefore become self-conscious. I will argue, that self-consciousness can be established using a modified Turing Test, which would determine if a robot believed in a meaningful narrative about itself (Ricoeur, 1991) and hence be self-conscious. This will lead to answering the question of this essay: what are the features necessary for a self-conscious robot in the light of “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel Dennett? (shrink)

What is this thing we each call “I” and consider the eye of consciousness, that which beholds objects in the world and objects in our minds? This inner perceiver seems to be the same I who calls forth memories or images at will, the I who feels and determines whether to act on those feelings or suppress them, as well as the I who worries and makes plans and attempts to avoid those worries and act on those plans. Am I (...) the subject, thus the source, of my awareness, just as you are the subject and source of your awareness? If this is the case, it is likely impossible to be conscious without the self (yours or mine), the eye of consciousness, and it must certainly not be desirable, for such a consciousness would have no focal point, no self-that-is-conscious to guide it, so it would be cast adrift on a wide and wild sea like a boat that has broken from its anchor. Without self-enclosure, “We shall go mad no doubt and die that way,” as Robert Graves (1927/1966) expressed it in "The Cool Web". (shrink)

Looking at responsibility within a Lévinasian sense, human beings are firstly seen not in the philosophically traditional sense, of being egocentric, but rather seen as ethical subjects based on “the other” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989). The purpose of this paper is to examine the notion of responsibility as Lévinas conceptualized in the idea that human beings are responsible for not only themselves but for others. Lévinas within “Ethics as First Philosophy” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989) states that before all other (...) forms of being in the world there must be responsibility to the Other (Lévinas & Hand, 1989). Lévinas defines this to mean that before freedom of the subject, and their subjectivity, before self-consciousness, before the consciousness of consciousness, before being, and before relativity there is “responsibility for the Other pre-exists any self-consciousness” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989, p.75). Perhaps, Lévinas is saying that a human beings obligation comes before all of what follows from our being in this world, our obligation to the Other beginning with the “face to face” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989, p.75), interaction, which is our first and foremost responsibility, the responsibility to the Other. And to be ethical beings who begin with responsibility we rely on the fundamental relationship of others. This notion of responsibility appears when we encounter, in the face-to-face interaction, the unknowable other. However, does this responsibility extend to more than two individuals and to those outside our immediate proximity? For example, Lévinas states that it is the “face to face” notion of seeing one in distress, yet what if it is a group of people, and what if they are not in close proximity but on the other side of the world? What if they are on the other side of a screen that can also be artificial intelligence in our modern era. Are we still responsible? And if we are responsible, how does Lévinas’s concept of responsibility fit into that situation or is it limited? I want to examine responsibility in terms of proximity through a Lévinasian ethical lens and plurality, defined as more than two individuals, by questioning responsibility in terms of relationality, and vulnerability. I will be looking mainly at five authors Emmanuel Lévinas, Ernst Van Alphen, Judith Butler, Kevin Quashi, and Lisa Guenther, to answer the question of whether Lévinas’s definition of responsibility includes proximity, and plurality. (shrink)

The nature of human mind has been an open question for more than 2000 years and it is still today a mystery. There has been during the last 30 years a renewed interest from science and philosophy on that subject. Among the existing research domains is neurophilosophy, an interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy looking at neuronal aspects of access consciousness, of phenomenal consciousness and at functional aspects of consciousness. We propose here to look if self-consciousness could have a (...) place in neurophilosophy by using an existing evolutionary scenario that can introduce possible links between neural processing and some aspects of self-consciousness. The scenario is about an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness where evolutions of inter-subjectivity and meaningful representations may have led our ancestors to identify with their conspecifics. The scenario proposes that this process has brought our pre-human ancestors to represent themselves as existing entities like the conspecifics they identified with were represented. Such a representation of oneself as an existing entity may have created an elementary version of self-consciousness that we name “ancestral self-consciousness”. But identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics has also produced an important anxiety increase. To limit that anxiety our ancestors have developed mental states and behaviors like caring, imitation communication and simulation. These performances have introduced evolutionary advantages leading to an evolutionary engine that has favored the development of ancestral self-consciousness toward our human self-consciousness. We begin by presenting a model for the generation of meaningful information based on a system submitted to an internal constraint (the Meaning Generator System). We use that model to introduce meaningful representations as networks of meaningful information. We then present the evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness that uses meaningful representations and the performance of inter-subjectivity. The scenario leads to propose two links between self-consciousness and neural processes: mirror-neurons as neural introduction to inter-subjectivity and self-consciousness as neural computation on meaningful representations. Possible continuations are highlighted. (shrink)

This paper endorses and expounds the widely held view that all experience involves pre-reflective self-consciousness or self-awareness. It argues that pre-reflective self-consciousness does not involve any sort of experience of ‘me-ness’ or ‘mine-ness’, and that all self-consciousness is essentially relational, essentially has the subject as intentional object, essentially involves representation, in particular self-representation, as well as ‘immediate acquaintance’, in particular immediate self-acquaintance; and cannot in one primordial respect involve a mistake on the part of (...) the subject of who it is. (shrink)

The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion (...) of “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

Self-consciousness is a product of evolution. Few people today disagree with the evolutionary history of humans. But the nature of self-consciousness is still to be explained, and the story of evolution has rarely been used as a framework for studies on consciousness during the 20th century. This last point may be due to the fact that modern study of consciousness came up at a time where dominant philosophical movements were not in favor of evolutionist theories (Cunningham 1996). Research (...) on consciousness based on Phenomenology or on Analytic Philosophy has been mostly taking the characteristics of humans as starting points. Relatively little has been done with bottom-up approaches, using performances of animals as a simpler starting point to understand the generation of consciousness through evolution. But this status may be changing, thanks to new tools coming from recent discoveries in neurology. The discovery of mirror neurons about ten years ago (Gallese et al. 1996, Rizzolatti et al. 1996) has allowed the built up of new conceptual tools for the understanding of intersubjectivity within humans and non human primates (Gallese 2001, Hurley 2005). Studies in these fields are still in progress, with discussions on the level of applicability of this natural intersubjectivity to non human primates (Decety and Chaminade 2003). We think that these subject/conspecific mental relations made possible by mirror neurons can open new paths for the understanding of the nature of self-consciousness via an evolutionist bottom-up approach. We propose here a scenario for the build up of self-consciousness through evolution by a specific analysis of two steps of evolution: first step from simple living elements to non human primates comparable to chimpanzees, and second step from these non human primates to humans. We identify these two steps as representing the evolution from basic animal awareness to body self-awareness, and from body self-awareness to self-consciousness. (we consider that today non human primates are comparable to what were pre-human primates). We position body self-awareness as corresponding to the performance of mirror self recognition as identified with chimpanzees and orangutans (Gallup). We propose to detail and understand the content of this body self-awareness through a specific evolutionist build up process using the performances of mirror neurons and group life. We address the evolutionary step from body self-awareness to self-consciousness by complementing the recently proposed approach where self-consciousness is presented as a by-product of body self-awareness amplification via a positive feedback loop resulting of anxiety limitation (Menant 2004). The scenario introduced here for the build up of self-consciousness through evolution leaves open the question about the nature of phenomenal-consciousness (Block 2002). We plan to address this question later on with the help of the scenario made available here. (shrink)

Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness into (...) an experiential center and periphery. I develop Watzl’s theory into an account of UIA by suggesting that a subject is acquainted with its own conscious mental states through being reflexively aware of how these states are structured by attention into a unified subjective perspective. I favorably compare this Watzl-inspired account of UIA against other contemporary analytic and classical Buddhist accounts of reflexive awareness and subjective character, which variously ground the inner awareness of conscious states on their intrinsic phenomenal quality of “for-me-ness,” their affective/hedonic valence, or a subject’s disposition to introspect them. The Watzl-inspired account also accommodates possible counter-examples to Watzl’s theory posed by states of minimal phenomenal experience such as lucid dreamless sleep and non-dual meditative awareness. (shrink)

Illusionism treats the almost universally held belief in our ability to make free choices as an erroneous, though beneficent, idea. According to this view, it is sadly true, though virtually impossible to believe, that none of a person’s choices are avoidable and ‘up to him’: any claim to the effect that they are being naïveté or, in the case of those who know better, pretense. Indeed, the implications of this skepticism are so disturbing, pace Spinoza, that it must not be (...) allowed to see the light of intellectual day, confined to the nether regions of consciousness. Even those who have ‘done the philosophy’ and disabused themselves here should nevertheless (somehow) continue believing in free will, lest they come to regard our lives as meaningless, spreading despair and social upheaval. Thus, the “Illusionists” who propound this view are themselves circumspect. -/- But is escaping the (putative) truth really possible here? Could a disabused philosopher ever return to something like his former intellectual innocence? Self-deception may not be possible; but would an attempt at it reveal anything significant about choice formation? If one were to try to regain one’s illusion, what would one realize? I shall argue here that one would reflectively discover precisely the opposite of what the Illusionists contend- that there are indeed free choices. Let us begin by considering the inconsistency that supposedly entails the illusion of free will. (shrink)

DARWIN’s (1859, 1871) discoveries have profound ethical implications that continue to be misrepresented and/or ignored. In contrast to socialdarwinistic misuses of his theory, Darwin was a great humanitarian who paved the way for an integrated scientific and ethical world view. As an ethical doctrine, socialdarwinism is long dead ever since its defeat by E. G. Moore although the socialdarwinistic thought is a hard-die in the biological community. The accusations of sociobiology for being socialdarwinistic are unfounded and stem from the moralistic (...) fallacy that is, a false assumption that morality is good by definition. Both social and developmental psychology demonstrate that the moral agency is a motivational device for executing reciprocity that remains at the core of any morality across all studied societies and throughout the ontogeny of moral judgment. The level of true universalizing ethical reflection (KOHLBERG’s postconvential stages or GIBBS’s existential phase) is achieved by a small minority of humans, thus showing that Homo sapiens is a moral but not an ethical animal. While the origin of reciprocity has been perfectly explained by sociobiology, the evolutionary assembly of affective and cognitive elements that make up the moral agency is being successfully studied by the social/personality/developmental psychology as extended to non-human primates. As DARWIN (1871) expected, the key innovation for the evolution of moral agency was the emergence of empathy that evolved independently at least three times: in elephants, dolphins and primates. Empathy has a motivational power of its own; it is also necessary for moral agency that requires two cognitive abilities: reflective self-consciousness and understanding of causality; the two make possible the attribution of responsibility. All these requirements are met by the chimpanzees whose moral agency operates in dyads. In contrast, the human moral agency allows for a third party intervention that opens up vast opportunities for ideologies, especially religions, to use and misuse the moral agency to enforce a reciprocation that may be harmful to both individuals and the entire group. Also, the moral agency is known to enforce enhanced intragroup cohesion and loyalty in response to conflict and war, which suggests that the two prima facie opposed human universals, morality and warfare, may have coevolved. The most important ethical consequence that follows from the increasing understanding of the primate moral agency is that every received morality is ethically flawed, none can be taken as a paragon of goodness, and each needs corrections by science-informed ethics. In fact, Darwin pioneered the integration of science and ethics, an approach that has come to be appreciated only recently under the heading of consilience. (shrink)

I offer a close reading of the first part of Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, arguing that contrary to widely held interpretation, one of Sartre's main goals in that text is to defend the view that consciousness does not necessitate self-awareness, that not all conscious states need be, ipso facto, states of self-awareness. In addition, I explain that this view about the conceptual relationship between consciousness and self-awareness has important methodological implications. One of the standard strategies (...) for accounting for the possibility of the type of capacity to have I* thoughts and attitudes is based on the assumption that being conscious necessarily entails being self-aware in at least a minimal sense, and then proceeds to explain how it I*-thoughts and attitudes are possible on the basis of those minimal states of self-awareness. Yet if Sartre's account of self-awareness is so much as plausible, this kind of strategy is bound to be incomplete. By helping itself to a notion of minimal self-awareness that is purportedly constitutive of consciousness, it fails to account for what is, by its own lights, the most fundamental form of self-awareness. (shrink)

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations constitutes an important source and subject for Michel Foucault’s 1981 lectures at the Collège de France, translated into English as Hermeneutics of the Subject. One recurring theme in these lectures is the deployment by Hellenistic/Roman philosophers such as Aurelius of the practice and figure of dance. Inspired by this discussion, the present essay offers a close reading of dance in the Meditations, followed by a survey of the secondary literature on this subject. Overall, I will attempt to (...) show that, despite Aurelius’s self-consciously critical comportment toward dance, dance nevertheless performs a critical function in the construction of what I will term his “political ethics.” This political ethics, I will argue, is composed of an ethics of patient tolerance funded by the generosity that flows from the micro-political power generated by cultivating the god that Aurelius identifies within each of us. (shrink)

In this issue of Studies in Transcendental Philosophy five scholars enquire about the theoretical aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy related to the notions of subject, self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. Andrew Brook examines Kant’s views on transcendental apperception at the end of the Critical Period, focusing on Opus Postumum which contains some of Kant’s most important reflections on the subjective dimension. As is known, the self-conscious act designated by the proposition ‘I think’ is an act of spontaneity, and this (...) spontaneity is the reason that the subject calls itself an intelligence. In his article Addison Ellis examines the theoretical and practical dimension of spontaneity, calling into question the distinction between a merely ‘relative’ spontaneity and one that is ‘absolute’. Luca Forgione points to two forms of self-consciousness introduced by Kant: inner sense, based on a sensory form of self-awareness, and transcendental apperception. Through the notion of inner sense, Kant also allows for an introspective account of self-awareness; nonetheless, Kant holds an utterly sophisticated notion of basic self-consciousness provided for by the notion of transcendental apperception. Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira’s article presents a systematic and a historical approach, linking the contemporary debate on transcendental argument to Kant’s philosophy. It addresses both Stroud’s objection and Strawson’s perspective on transcendental argument and introduces a new reconstruction of Kant’s Refutation as successful truth-directed transcendental argument. In contrast to the contemporary movement of transhumanism and its claims that creatures like us can exist independently of our bodies, Robert Hanna develops a generalist perspective on the subjective dimension, according to which all rational human creature are synthetic a priori necessarily, essentially embodied Kantian selves. I would like to thank the authors for participating in this issue and for helping to make it really special. (shrink)

Representing oneself as an existing entity and having intense fear of the unknown are human specificities. Self-consciousness and anxiety states are characteristics of our human minds. We propose that these two characteristics share a common evolutionary history during which they acted in synergy for the build-up of our human minds. We present that perspective by using an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness in which anxiety management plays a key role. Such evolutionary background can introduce new relations between philosophy of (...) mind and psychology. The proposed evolutionary scenario starts at the Pan-Homo split time (about 6my ago) when our pre-human ancestors were able to manage representations while also being able to partly identify with their conspecifics. These identifications allowed our ancestors to merge the representations they had of parts of themselves with the corresponding representations they had of their conspecifics. The scenario proposes that such merger has led our ancestors to progressively build up a representation of their own entity as existing in the environment, like conspecifics were represented as existing. This evolutionary process is considered in the scenario as the source of an ancestral form of self-consciousness. The same process has also produced identifications with suffering or endangered conspecifics which have created in the minds of our ancestors some new anxieties coming in addition to the animal ones. The resulting psychological sufferings had to be limited for evolution to continue. The tools developed to that end by our ancestors (caring, collaboration, communication, ToM, ...) have also procured significant evolutionary benefits with positive feedbacks on identifications. Overall, the evolutionary scenario proposes that the combination of the anxiety management processes with the evolution toward self-consciousness has created an evolutionary engine that has accelerated the coming up of our human self-consciousness. As a result, our today human minds contain important anxieties interwoven with an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness. Such perspective brings to consider that many of our mental states may be unconsciously guided by these evolutionary sourced anxieties (which are still to be clearly understood). Corresponding anxiety management processes are then key contributors to our human feelings and motivations, and to our interpersonal relationship. For instance, the role of Pascalian type diversions can be understood as keeping consciousness away from psychological sufferings produced by too anxious mental states. Also, part of our human sexuality developed during human evolution can be considered as a multidimensional escape and refuge from anxiety. This also brings to look at our psychological well-being and to our mental health as much more related to anxiety management than assumed so far. Dis-functioning of anxiety management processes can then be source of mental disorders and illnesses. On that subject the evolutionary scenario proposes that avoidances of too anxious mental states can lead to evil behaviors. These subjects need more developments. Possible continuations are introduced. (shrink)

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance of (...) place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West. (shrink)

This paper presents a new cognitivist account for the old puzzle of self-consciousness or knowing self-reference. Knowing self-reference does not rely on reflection on some putative pre-existent pre-reflexive self-consciousness, nor is it the result of a process of identification of oneself as the employer of the relevant token of “I” according to the token-reflexive rule of the first-person pronoun. Rather, it relies on the architecture of the cognitive system. By exploiting the acquaintance relation that every brain (...) has to one’s own body, a “mental file” is opened in a subliminal way to house information about oneself gained through the appropriate proprioceptors. Knowing self-reference based on self-files dispenses with self-identification because the opening of the file in the same brain/body is not a deed of the cognitive system but rather something that takes place sub-personally. (shrink)