Ebook: The subject of consciousness

"In this book I develop a philosophical theory of the self the purpose of which is to explain how it is that our experience of being selves is an experience of being continuous subjects of experience. That is to say, the theory is offered as an explanation of self-awareness.

On many current theories of the self put forward by philosophers working in the empiricist tradition self-awareness is reduced to awareness of the states which at the time the self is in. This is not what I understand self-awareness to be. I believe that self-awareness is the awareness of the self as the conscious subject of the states of the self. ‘This book is both an attempt to show how this is possible and an attempt to show what awareness of the conscious subject consists in. Essentially, in my dispute with the reductive view I attempt to show what self-awareness is not, by showing what it is.

It would be fitting to describe the work as an exercise in constructive philosophy. It develops a conceptual apparatus specifically for the purpose of presenting a philosophical theory. On this account the book needs to be read consecutively to be understood. The concepts fashioned in the early chapters are applied systematically as the theory is unfolded in the later chapters. Because the theory has some of the characteristics of a system it has ramifications that go beyond the problems of the self and reach into the foundations of the Philosophy of Mind.

Although the book is not written from a phenomenological point of view, many of its conclusions are relevant to phenomenology. If some have already been anticipated by phenomenologists this would add to my confidence in them, and I would add that phenomenologists might nevertheless derive some interest from seeing how someone working, broadly speaking, within the analytic tradition had reached them." [from the preface]