Dan Zahavi

In his recent book ‘Kant and the Mind’ Andrew Brook makes a distinction between two types of selfawareness. The first type, which he calls empirical self-awareness, is an awareness of particular psychological states such as perceptions, memories, desires, bodily sensations etc. One attains this type of self-awareness simply by having particular experiences and being aware of them. To be in possession of empirical self-awareness is, in short, simply to be conscious of one’s occurrent experience. The second type of self-awareness he calls apperceptive self-awareness. This type of self-awareness entails an awareness of oneself as the subject of experience. For this type of self-awareness to obtain, it would not be enough merely to be conscious of, say, an occurrent perception of a chair, one would also have to be aware that it was oneself who was perceiving the chair. And as Brook adds, when I am self-aware in this way, I am not only aware of being the subject of a single experience, but also aware of myself as the common subject of other psychological states (Brook, 1994: 55-57). I find Brook’s distinction illuminating, but it raises a question which I would like to pursue in this paper. When we speak of self-awareness, do we then necessarily also speak of a self, is there so to speak always a self involved in self-awareness, or is it rather the case, as Brook’s notion of empirical selfawareness might suggest, that there are types of self-awareness which are ‘selfless’, or to use two other related terms ‘subjectless’ or ‘non-egological’? Is self-awareness always to be understood as an awareness of a self, or can it be understood simply as the awareness which a specific experience has of itself? Ultimately, I believe an answer to these questions are important, both when it comes to an understanding of what exactly self-awareness amounts to, and also when it comes to a proper understanding of what a self is..

When it comes to understanding the nature of social cognition, we have— according to the standard view—a choice between the simulation theory, the theory-theory or some hybrid between the two. The aim of this paper is to argue that there are, in fact, other options available, and that one such option has been articulated by various think- ers belonging to the phenomenological tradition. More specifically, the paper will con- trast Lipps’ account of empathy—an account that has recently undergone something of a revival in the hands of contemporary simulationists—with various accounts of empa- thy found in the phenomenological tradition. I discuss the way Lipps was criticized by Scheler, Stein and Husserl, and outline some of the core features of their, at times diver- gent, alternatives. I then proceed by considering how their basic take on empathy and social cognition was taken up and modified by Schutz—a thinker whose contribution to the analysis of interpersonal understanding has been unjustly neglected in recent years.

If one looks at the current discussion of self-awareness there seems to be a general agreement that whatever valuable philosophical contributions Husserl might have made, his account of self-awareness is not among them. This prevalent appraisal is often based on the claim that Husserl was too occupied with the problem of intentionality to ever really pay attention to the issue of self-awareness. Due to his interest in intentionality Husserl took object-consciousness as the paradigm of every kind of awareness and therefore settled with a model of self-awareness based upon the subject-object dichotomy, with its entailed difference between the intending and the intended. As a consequence, Husserl never discovered the existence of pre-reflective self- awareness, but remained stuck in the traditional, but highly problematic reflection model of self-awareness

Among the many accomplishments achieved by Husserl's theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, the outline of an intentional account of perception counts among the most prominent. 1 One of the consequences of this account was a severe criticism of the traditional representative theory of perception, and my aim in the following paper is to present this criticism and some of its ontological implications. 2 Even though Husserl's critique was directed against the positions of thinkers like Locke, Kant, Brentano and Twardowski, it is my contention that his arguments are also valid against modem theories of perception, insofar as they belong to one of the two following versions of a repre- sentative theory:

In his Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912, Natorp formulates a by now classical criticism of phenomenology. 1. Phenomenology claims to describe and analyze lived subjectivity itself. In order to do so it employs a reflective methodology. But reflection is a kind of internal perception; it is a theoretical attitude; it involves an objectification. And as Natorp then asks, how is this objectifying procedure ever going to provide us with access to lived subjectivity itself? 2. Phenomenology aims at describing the experiential structures in their pretheoretical immediacy. But every description involves the use of language, involves the use of generalizing and subsuming concepts. For the very same reason, every description and expression involves a mediation and objectification that necessarily estranges us from subjectivity itself.In his early lecture course Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem of 1919 Heidegger responds to Natorp's challenge and attempts to show that the criticism is based on some questionable assumptions. More specifically, Heidegger argues that Natorp's criticism might be pertinent when it comes to a phenomenology based on a reflective methodology, i.e. when it comes to a Husserlian phenomenology, but it is wide of the mark when it comes to Heidegger's own hermeneutical phenomenology.In this paper I wish to present both Natorp's criticism and Heidegger's response in detail. One of the aims will be to articulate the criticism that Heidegger himself—via his discussion with Natorp—directs against a reflective phenomenology. In the final part of the paper I will then evaluate the pertinence of this criticism. Is it at all justified?

If we want to assess whether or not a naturalized phenomenology is a desideratum or a category mistake, we need to be clear on precisely what notion of phenomenology and what notion of naturalization we have in mind. In the article I distinguish various notions, and after criticizing one type of naturalized phenomenology, I sketch two alternative takes on what a naturalized phenomenology might amount to and propose that our appraisal of the desirability of such naturalization should be more positive, if we opt for one or both of the latter alternatives.

One of the central questions within contemporary debates about collective intentionality concerns the notion and status of the we. The question, however, is by no means new. At the beginning of the last century, it was already intensively discussed in phenomenology. Whereas Heidegger argued that a focus on empathy is detrimental to a proper understanding of the we, and that the latter is more fundamental than any dyadic interaction, other phenomenologists, such as Stein, Walther and Husserl, insisted on the importance of empathy for proper we-experiences. In this paper, I will present some of the key moves in this debate and then discuss and assess Husserl’s specific proposal, according to which reciprocal empathy, second-person engagement and self-alienation are all important presuppositions for group-identification and we-identity.

In a number of papers, Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre have claimed that Husserl is an internalist. In this paper, it is argued that their interpretation is based on two questionable assumptions: (1) that Husserl's noema should be interpreted along Fregean lines, and (2) that Husserl's transcendental methodology commits him to some form of methodological solipsism. Both of these assumptions are criticized on the basis of the most recent Husserl-research. It is shown that Husserl's concept of noema can be interpreted in a manner that makes his theory far more congenial to a certain type of externalism, but ultimately it is argued that his phenomenological analysis of intentionality entails such a fundamental rethinking of the very relation between subjectivity and world that it hardly makes sense to designate it as being either internalist or externalist.

One of the striking features of Logical Investigations is its metaphysical neutrality. What are the implications of this neutrality? Should it be counted among the many virtues of the work, or rather mourned as a fateful shortcoming? In an article published in the beginning of the nineties, I answered this question rather unequivocally. At that time I considered the neutrality in question to be highly problematic. In the meantime, however, I have had the pleasure of reading Jocelyn Benoist’s recent work Phénoménologie, sémantique, ontologie, where he argues for the opposite conclusion, criticizing my own interpretation in the process. In the light of this criticism, I would like to use this occasion to reconsider the question anew

This chapter argues that explicit self-conscious thinking is founded on an implicit form of self-awareness built into the very structure of phenomenal consciousness. In broad strokes, the argument is that a theory denying the existence of pre-reflective or minimal self-awareness has difficulties explaining a number of essential features of explicit first-person self-reference, and that this will impede a proper understanding of certain types of psychopathology. The chapter proceeds by discussion of a number of prominent theories of self-knowledge and self-reference relating them to forms of self-consciousness. It is then argued that getting these various relations right is important to a proper understanding of a number of psychopathological phenomena.

If the self—as a popular view has it—is a narrative construction, if it arises out of discursive practices, it is reasonable to assume that the best possible avenue to self-understanding will be provided by those very narratives. If I want to know what it means to be a self, I should look closely at the stories that I and others tell about myself, since these stories constitute who I am. In the following I wish to question this train of thought. I will argue that we need to operate with a more primitive and fundamental notion of self; a notion of self that cannot be captured in terms of narrative structures. In a parallel move, I will argue that there is a crucial dimension of what it means to be other that is equally missed by the narrative approach. I will consequently defend the view that there are limits to the kind of understanding of self and others that narratives can provide.

The ‘self’ is increasingly used as a variable in cognitive experiments and correlated with activity in particular areas in the brain. At first glance, this seems to transform the self from an ephemeral theoretical entity to something concrete and measurable. However, the transformation is by no means unproblematic. We trace the development of two important experimental paradigms in the study of the self, self-face recognition and the adjective self ascription task. We show how the experimental instrumentalization has gone hand in hand with a simplification of the self-concept, and how more conceptual and theoretical reflections on the structure, function and nature of self have either disappeared altogether or receded into the background. We argue that this development impedes and complicates the interdisciplinary study of self

Sartre’s analysis of intersubjectivity in the third part of Being and Nothingness is guided by two main motives1. First of all, Sartre is simply expanding his ontological investigation of the essential structure of and relation between the for-itself (pour-soi) and the in-itself (en-soi). For as he points out, I need the Other in order fully to understand the structure of my own being, since the for-itself refers to the for-others (EN 267/303, 260/298); moreover, as he later adds, a treatment of the relation to the in-itself must necessarily include an analysis of the Other precisely because this relation is played out in the presence of the Other (EN 410/472). Secondly, Sartre wants to supply a concrete solution to the problem of solipsism (EN 289/329, 296/337). This problem was already preoccupying him in The Transcendence of the Ego, but at that time, Sartre argued that solipsism could be avoided by means of a non-egological theory of consciousness, since such a theory—which sees the transcendental field of consciousness as non-personal and the I as a product of reflection (TE 36/52-53, 63/80- 81)—would no longer confer a privileged status to the I vis-à-vis the Other (TE 85/104). In Being and Nothingness, however, Sartre concedes that this renunciation of the transcendental I has in fact been of no help in overcoming solipsism (EN 280/318). The problem remains and has to be solved. As he is quick to add, however, a proper solution will not involve any proof of the existence of Others; rather, it will be a question of revealing the foundation of our “pre-ontological” certainty with regard to the existence of the Other (EN..

Résumé — Dans sa contribution, Dan Zahavi discute de la relation entre la phénoménologie et la métaphysique. La phénoménologie est-elle métaphysiquement neutre ou est-elle sans rapport métaphysique ? Est-elle une sorte de propédeutique vis-à-vis de la métaphysique ou la phénoménologie est-elle au contraire une forme de métaphysique, peut-être même le sommet d’une sorte particulière de métaphysique ? Alors que la position de Husserl dans les Logische Untersuchungen peut être décrite comme métaphysiquement neutre, Zahavi argumente que la phénoménologie transcendantale de Husserl ne reste pas neutre ou indifférente à la question de la relation entre phénomène et réalité, et que par conséquent cela a nécessairement des implications métaphysiques.— In his contribution, Dan Zahavi discusses the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics. Is phenomenology metaphysically neutral, or is it without metaphysical bearings ? Is it a kind of propaedeutics to metaphysics, or is phenomenology, on the contrary, a form of metaphysics, perhaps even the culmination of a particular kind of metaphysics ? Whereas Husserl’s position in Logische Untersuchungen can be described as metaphysically neutral, Zahavi argues that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology does not remain neutral or indifferent to the question of the relation between phenomena and reality, and that it therefore necessarily has metaphysical implications