The Paradox of Self-consciousness

The Paradox of Self-consciousness
Author: José Luis Bermúdez
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262522779

In this book, Jos� Luis Berm�dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Berm�dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer.

Self-consciousness

Self-consciousness
Author: Sebastian Rödl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2007
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780674024946

Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.

Self-Consciousness and Objectivity

Self-Consciousness and Objectivity
Author: Sebastian Ršdl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-01-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674976517

Sebastian Rödl undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. This profound work revives the thought that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.

Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination

Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination
Author: Ernst Tugendhat
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 1989-09-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262700387

A unique synthesis of the contemporary, Anglo-American philosophical approach with an abiding concern for classical philosophical problems. This book seeks to clarify the precise structure of self-consciousness and self-determination and elucidates their significance for our philosophical understanding of self-knowledge and human agency.The analysis challenges traditional models of theoretical self-knowledge and practical self-relation and elaborates an account of rationally grounded responsibility that jointly fulfills the demands of autonomy and authenticity.Tugendhat's study is a unique synthesis of the contemporary Anglo-American philosophical approach with an abiding concern for classical philosophical problems. It brings the methods of linguistic analysis to bear on such epistemological, moral, and metaphysical issues as the meaning and interconnections of self-knowledge, ego identity, rational self-understanding, and freedom of the will. In this context, the views of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Mead, and Hegel are searchingly examined. The philosophical testimony of Kierkegaard, Freud, Habermas, and others is also presented and weighed. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination is based on a series of lectures given at Heidelberg. The book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Others in Mind

Others in Mind
Author: Philippe Rochat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2009-02-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0521506352

Based on empirical observations, this innovative book explores self-consciousness, how it originates and how it shapes our lives.

Our Own Minds

Our Own Minds
Author: Radu J. Bogdan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2010
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262026376

An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develope self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation. In Our Own Minds, Radu Bogdan takes a developmental perspective on consciousness--its functional design in particular--and proposes that children's functional capacity for consciousness is assembled during development out of a variety of ontogenetic adaptations that respond mostly to sociocultural challenges specific to distinct stages of childhood. Young human minds develop self-consciousness--in the broad sense of being conscious of the self's mental and behavioral relatedness to the world--because they face extraordinary and escalating sociocultural pressures that cannot be handled without setting in motion a complex executive machinery of self-regulation under the guidance of an increasingly sophisticated intuitive psychology. Bogdan suggests that self-consciousness develops gradually during childhood. Children move from being oriented toward the outside world in early childhood to becoming (at about age four) oriented also toward their own minds. Bogdan argues that the sociocultural tasks and practices that children must assimilate and engage in competently demand the development of an intuitive psychology (also known as theory of mind or mind reading); the intuitive psychology assembles a suite of executive abilities (intending, controlling, monitoring, and so on) that install self-consciousness and drive its development. Understanding minds, first the minds of others and then our own, drives the development of self-consciousness, world-bound or extrovert at the beginning and later mind-bound or introvert. This asymmetric development of the intuitive psychology drives a commensurate asymmetric development of self-consciousness.

Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject

Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject
Author: Simon Lumsden
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-08-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231538200

Poststructuralists hold Hegel responsible for giving rise to many of modern philosophy's problematic concepts—the authority of reason, self-consciousness, the knowing subject. Yet, according to Simon Lumsden, this animosity is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegel's thought, and resolving this tension can not only heal the rift between poststructuralism and German idealism but also point these traditions in exciting new directions. Revisiting the philosopher's key texts, Lumsden calls attention to Hegel's reformulation of liberal and Cartesian conceptions of subjectivity, identifying a critical though unrecognized continuity between poststructuralism and German idealism. Poststructuralism forged its identity in opposition to idealist subjectivity; however, Lumsden argues this model is not found in Hegel's texts but in an uncritical acceptance of Heidegger's characterization of Hegel and Fichte as "metaphysicians of subjectivity." Recasting Hegel as both post-Kantian and postmetaphysical, Lumsden sheds new light on this complex philosopher while revealing the surprising affinities between two supposedly antithetical modes of thought.

The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness

The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness
Author: Dan Zahavi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2004-09-23
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9027295131

Self-consciousness is a topic of considerable importance to a variety of empirical and theoretical disciplines such as developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This volume presents essays on self-consciousness by prominent psychologists, cognitive neurologists, and philosophers. Some of the topics included are the infants’ sense of self and others, theory of mind, phenomenology of embodiment, neural mechanisms of action attribution, and hermeneutics of the self. A number of these essays argue in turn that empirical findings in developmental psychology, phenomenological analyses of embodiment, or studies of pathological self-experiences point to the existence of a type of self-consciousness that does not require any explicit I —thought or self-observation, but is more adequately described as a pre-reflective, embodied form of self-familiarity. The different contributions in the volume amply demonstrate that self-consciousness is a complex multifaceted phenomenon that calls for an integration of different complementary interdisciplinary perspectives. (Series B)

Thinking about Oneself

Thinking about Oneself
Author: Kristina Musholt
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262329778

A novel theory of self-consciousness and its development that integrates philosophical considerations with recent findings in the empirical sciences. In this book, Kristina Musholt offers a novel theory of self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. Traditionally, self-consciousness has been central to many philosophical theories. More recently, it has become the focus of empirical investigation in psychology and neuroscience. Musholt draws both on philosophical considerations and on insights from the empirical sciences to offer a new account of self-consciousness—the ability to think about ourselves that is at the core of what makes us human. Examining theories of nonconceptual content developed in recent work in the philosophy of cognition, Musholt proposes a model for the gradual transition from self-related information implicit in the nonconceptual content of perception and other forms of experience to the explicit representation of the self in conceptual thought. A crucial part of this model is an analysis of the relationship between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and awareness of others, Musholt argues, are two sides of the same coin. After surveying the philosophical problem of self-consciousness, the notion of nonconceptual content, and various proposals for the existence of nonconceptual self-consciousness, Musholt argues for a non-self-representationalist theory, according to which the self is not part of the representational content of perception and bodily awareness but part of the mode of presentation. She distinguishes between implicitly self-related information and explicit self-representation, and describes the transitions from the former to the latter as arising from a complex process of self–other differentiation. By this account, both self-consciousness and intersubjectivity develop in parallel.

Self Consciousness

Self Consciousness
Author: Anthony Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134889321

Cohen establishes the importance of the self and argues that in order to appreciate the complexity of social formations, one must first take note of individuals awareness of themselves and as authors of social contexts and formations.