Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, this paper illustrates how highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in...
We are embodied, and we are aware of our bodies ‘from the inside’ through different forms of bodily awareness. But what is the relation between these two facts? Are these forms of bodily awareness types of self-consciousness, on a par, say, with introspection? In this paper I argue that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness, through which perceiving agents are directly...
There is an interesting dialectic between discussions of bodily awareness in the phenomenological tradition and in contemporary philosophy of mind and scientific psychology. It shows, with particular reference to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, how phenomenological insights into bodily awareness and its role in agency can be developed and illuminated by research into somatic...