Consciousness and the Self
New Essays

New essays connecting recent scientific studies with traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume.

JeeLoo Liu (Edited by), John Perry (Edited by)

9781107000759, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2011

270 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.6 cm, 0.57 kg

"...I'll lay my cards on the table right away and say that this is a good book. It's not too often that I read a collection such as this cover to cover, and I found doing so with this volume very rewarding. The book contains plenty of chewy philosophical argumentation and the, admittedly only occasional, references between papers were illuminating. There's a lot to learn, and to engage with, here.... It's a good book, with lots of careful papers and serious arguments. Anybody with even a passing interest in self-consciousness, consciousness or the self, cannot fail to learn something from its pages."
--Joel Smith, University of Manchester, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.' These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood and the epistemic access to one's own thoughts, desires or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.

Introduction: consciousness and the self
1. Awareness and identification of self David Rosenthal
2. Self-representationalism and the explanatory gap Uriah Kriegel
3. Thinking about the self John Perry
4. Ordinary self-consciousness Lucy O'Brien
5. Waiting for the self Jesse Prinz
6. I think I think, therefore I am - I think: skeptical doubts about self-knowledge Fred Dretske
7. Knowing what I want Alex Byrne
8. Self-ignorance Eric Schwitzgebel
9. Personhood and consciousness Sydney Shoemaker
10. My non-narrative, non-forensic Dasein: the first and second self Owen Flanagan.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of mind [HPM], Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK], Philosophy [HP]