Self-Experience Essays on Inner Awareness

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self--a self-experience--whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called mineness, for-me-ness, pre-reflective self-awareness and subjective character, among others.

This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy.

This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question.

The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a 'sense of self' might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions, and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved.

The first part of the book is devoted to more sceptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones.

Manuel García-Carpintero, Professor of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona,Marie Guillot, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Essex

Manuel García-Carpintero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He has been a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh, 2001), and he has been appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Lisbon (2013-onwards). His main interests are in philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and related epistemological and metaphysical issues.

Marie Guillot is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, especially subjectivity, self-consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, indexicality, and the ethics and politics of speech acts.

1. Introduction: Views about Self-Experience, Manuel García-Carpintero and Marie Guillot
Part I: Doubts and Questions About Self-Experience
2. Conscious Experience: What's In It For Me?, Léa Salje and Alexander Geddes
3. Four Impediments to the Case for Mineness, Tom McClelland
4. Transparency and Subjective Character, Robert Howell
5. Mineness, Deflation, and Transparency, Gianfranco Soldati
6. Mineness and Introspective Data, Wayne Wu
7. The Sense of Body Ownership: What Are We Studying?, Krisztina Orbán and Hong Yu Wong
Part II: Putting Self-Experience to Work
8. The Three Circles of Consciousness, Uriah Kriegel
9. Experiencing Subjects and So-called Mine-ness, Martine Nida-Rümelin
10. The Phenomenal Concept of Self and First-Person Epistemology, Marie Guillot
11. The Bounded Body: On the Sense of Bodily Ownership and the Experience of Space, Carlota Serrahima
12. The Phenomenology of Bodily Ownership, Frédérique de Vignemont
13. Emotions of Mineness, Richard Dub
14. What Is It Like to Lack Mineness? Depersonalization as a Probe for the Scope, Nature and Role of Mineness, Alexandre Billon
15. The Ownership of Memories, Jordi Fernández