Abstracts

 Dan Zahavi

Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Selfhood: A Reply to Some Critics

In my most comprehensive discussion of the relation between consciousness and selfhood to date, to be found in Self and Other (2014), I outline an experience-based approach to selfhood according to which the self is a built-in feature of experiential life. I distinguish and contrast this notion of self with a variety of other notions, and then proceed to engage with and reply to a number of objections that has been and might be raised against this notion. Lately, a new wave of critical papers has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology. In my talk, to complement my previous work, I reply directly to these recent objections that differ widely in range and character. 

Marie Guillot

First-person Reasons and the Minimal Self

This paper explores some implications of the notion of a minimal self for moral deliberation. That something will happen to me is a reason to care about it in a particular way. This is what we may call “self-concern”: as Setiya (2015) puts it, it might seem as though there are reasons, in the practical realm, whose force turns on their first-person character. Setiya goes on to reject the self-concern thesis, based on the argument that if we look at how the first-person concept works, we find no grounds for caring particularly about its referent. Building on joint work with Lucy O’Brien, this paper tries to rescue the self-concern intuition. I call into question Setiya’s understanding of the self-concept, on the grounds that it overlooks some plausible ways in which this concept might be anchored in basic self-experience. I argue that self-concern, properly interpreted, flows from a relation of dependence between the self-concept and the phenomenology associated with the minimal self.

Christoph Durt

Minimal Self, For-me-ness, and the Openness of Experience  

In my presentation, I first try to overcome some of the confusion about pre-reflective self-awareness by illustrating how the minimal self can be understood as experiential rather than formal. I then argue that experiential “for-me-ness” is a necessary constituent of minimal self-awareness, but that by itself it is not sufficient to account for minimal self-awareness. For-me-ness is due to the openness of experience, both toward modifications of the respective experience and toward other experiences, which may be had by oneself or by others. Besides being a necessary condition for for-me-ness, the openness of experience is a key part of pre-reflective self-awareness in its own right and needs to be included in the concept of minimal self. Already at its experiential foundation, the self is not a self-contained thing or core but comprises the indissoluble tension between one’s experience and awareness of the incompleteness of one’s experience.

Thomas Fuchs

The Feeling of Being Alive: Organismic Foundations of Self-awareness

The feeling of being alive points to an intricate connection between the organic process of life and subjective experience, or between Leben and Erleben. The paper argues that prereflective self-awareness in its most basic sense should be considered a self-manifestation of the life process of the organism as a whole. To this aim, the paper

(1) distinguishes two components of feeling of alive, namely vitality (basic mood states or Befinden) and conation (drive, need, affect);

(2) shows that the feeling of being-alive is a self-feeling;

(3) points out its foundations in self-regulatory processes involving the living organism. 

Moreover, it is shown that the feeling of being alive already implies a basic temporality. Finally, will argue that the sufficient basis of self-awareness cannot be found in the brain, but only in the self-organization and the life process of the whole organism.

Martine Nida-Rümelin

Awareness of Oneself as an Experiencing Subject

 I will propose and discuss the following claims:

(1) Any experience is, necessarily, the experience of some experiencing subject.

(2) Experiential properties are by their nature such that having them is to be aware of having them.

(3) In the case of higher animals such as adult humans, having experiences involves being aware of oneself.

(4) The kind of self-awareness at issue in (3) is awareness of oneself as an experiencing subject.

(5) Awareness of oneself as an experiencing subject in the sense at issue in (4) provides access to our own nature as experiencing subjects. 

Based on these claims I will argue that we may acquire insights about our own metaphysical nature based on phenomenological reflection. 

Galen Strawson

The Solo Self: Core Self-awareness and the Unimportance of the Other

This paper adumbrates the core forms and degrees of self-awareness—explicit, minimal, background, foreground, non-thetic, thetic, express, fully self-conscious—and argues that awareness of other subjects of experience plays no essential or constitutive role in any of them. Awareness of others is relevant only when questions of affect arise.

Philipp Schmidt

Disagreeing on Minimal Self and Intersubjectivity. Terminological Squabbles?

In my talk, I address the discussion of the so-called social or intersubjective character of minimal self. First, I demonstrate that this discussion suffers from a heterogeneous and sometimes unclear use of central concepts. I then argue that many of the misunderstandings derive from the existence of two distinct motivations to engage with the ‘minimal self’-debate: (1) the aim to understand the structure of phenomenal consciousness; (2) the aim to understand what it means to be a self. I will further show how both tendencies bring each their unique explanatory criteria to the debate, given their overlapping but incongruent explananda. Despite acknowledging these different motivations and implied terminological preferences, I contend that proponents of both camps need to accommodate all explanatory criteria introduced to the discussion, and defend the view that disagreements concerning minimal self and intersubjectivity cannot be reduced to terminological squabbles. I conclude by giving examples where further work seems necessary.