Dan Zahavi

Many scientists have until recently considered consciousness to be unsuitable for scientific research. As Damasio remarks, 'studying consciousness was simply not the thing to do before you made tenure, and even after you did it was looked upon with suspicion' . Prompted by technological developments as well as conceptual changes, this attitude has changed within the last decade or so, and an explanation of consciousness is currently seen by many as one of the few remaining major unsolved problems of modern science. It has become customary to describe this change in terms of an ongoing 'Consciousness Boom'. What is occasionally forgotten, however, is that although contemporary main stream neuroscience might only recently have started to investigate consciousness, the topic is by no means a terra incognita for those familiar with the philosophical tradition. Since the beginning of the modern era, consciousness has been subjected to intense investigations by such diverse thinkers as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, James, Dilthey, Bergson and many others. As for more recent times, consciousness and subjectivity have been of main concern to phenomenologists throughout the twentieth century, whereas the interest in these issues in analytical philosophy has only been particularly evident in the last ten to fifteen years. The majority of the systematic investigations in analytical philosophy have moreover been conducted in a rather ahistorical manner, with no particular attention being paid to the possible resources of the tradition. But by ignoring the tradition one might miss out on important insights that in the best of circumstances end up being rediscovered decades or centuries later.

In her editorial introduction to the special issue 10 years of Viewing from Within: the Legacy of Francisco Varela as well as in her co-authored contribution 'The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence' , Claire Petitmengin expresses some reservations about the way I have been characterizing reflection in some of my earlier writings. In replying to the criticism, I will use the occasion to amplify some of my previous remarks, pinpoint what I take to be some ambiguities in Petitmengin and Bitbol's own positive proposal, make some additional points that relate directly to the important questions that they raise in their joint paper, and finish off with a few remarks regarding one of the central claims made by Vermersch in his contribution to the special issue

There is a long tradition in philosophy for claiming that selfhood is socially constructed and self-experience intersubjectively mediated. On many accounts, we consequently have to distinguish between being conscious or sentient and being a self. The requirements that must be met in order to qualify for the latter are higher. My aim in the following is to challenge this form of social constructivism by arguing that an account of self which disregards the fundamental structures and features of our experiential life is a non-starter, and that a correct description and account of the experiential dimension must do justice to the first-person perspective and to the primitive form of self-referentiality, mineness or for-me-ness that it entails. I then consider and discuss various objections to this account, in particular the view that an endorsement of such a minimal notion of self commits one to an outdated form of Cartesianism. In the final part of the paper, I argue that the self is so multifaceted a phenomenon that various complementary accounts must be integrated if we are to do justice to its complexity

Until recently, cognitive research in infantile autism primarily focussed on the ability of autistic subjects to understand and predict the actions of others. Currently, researchers are also considering the capacity of autists to understand their own minds. In this article we discuss selected recent contributions to the theory of mind debate and the study of infantile autism, and provide an analysis of intersubjectivity and self-awareness that is informed both by empirical research and by work in the phenomenological tradition. This analysis uncovers certain problems in the theory-theory account of autism, and at the same time illustrates the potential value of phenomenology for cognitive science