Abstract: While we can explicitly reflect upon ourselves and our mental states, we often don’t. It would be odd to walk around thinking “I am thinking.” Nevertheless, it seems that there is a sense that even when we are engaged in unreflective tasks we know we are conscious. There is, according to many philosophers, a pre-reflective self-consciousness that ultimately underwrites our moments of...
Abstract: The existence of a self seems both mysterious and inevitable. On the one hand, philosophers from the Buddha to Sartre doubt its existence. As Hume writes, when we introspect we find thoughts, feelings, and conscious states, but nothing that has them. The subject of experience is elusive, but its existence seems certain. Descartes’ cogito is beyond doubt and the thought that “I am...
AbstractIn this chapter, I argue that subjective character, if it is phenomenologically substantial, conflicts with the transparency of perceptual experience. More specifically, if subjective character accompanies all conscious states, then it should exist in unreflective perceptual states. These states, however, appear transparent and there is no room for self-referential phenomenology on the...
A purely metaphysical formulation of physicalism is surprisingly elusive. One popular slogan is, ‘There is nothing over and above the physical’. Problems with this arise on two fronts. First, it is difficult to explain what makes a property ‘physical’ without appealing to the methodology of physics or to particular ways in which properties are known. This obviously introduces epistemic features...