Thomas Metzinger

In the current debate, very few people have penetrated as deeply into the self-model theory of subjectivity and have developed such a scholarly expertise on the project as a whole as Dorothée Legrand has done. In the last sentence of her commentary, Legrand alludes to the ugly consequences I have to face after calling the book Being No One: I am suddenly confronted with people from all over the world who are stomping their feet on the ground like stubborn children, claiming that they definitely are someone, and that they definitely have a self. In 1993, I published a German precursor to BNO, titled Subject and Self-Model—The Perspectivalness of Phenomenal Consciousness Against the Background of a Naturalist Theory of Mental Representation. From this title alone, it can be seen that I was not interested in demolishing classical theories of the self as a metaphysical substance, but rather in an empirically informed representationalist approach to the phenomenal self. In particular, I wanted to get a grip on the relationship between the epistemic subject and the phenomenal self it uses in the attempt to gain self-knowledge. The mistake I made, and to which Legrand alludes at the end of her brilliant commentary, was assuming that for a predominately American readership, such a title would be much too “wordy.” Now I am paying the price – the price for having diverted many of my readers’ attention to discussions about how our folk-phenomenological intuitions about selfhood can somehow be rescued. The title Being No One has distracted a lot of attention that would probably be better focused on the subtle and difficult issues associated with the attempt to construct a tenable theory about the interaction between self-knowledge and self-experience. But Dorothée Legrand cannot be distracted.

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001

This is a short sketch of some central ideas developed in my recent book _Being No One_ (BNO hereafter). A more systematic summary, which focuses on short answers to a set of specific, individual questions is already contained _in _the book, namely as BNO section 8.2. Here, I deliberately and completely exclude all work related to semantically differentiating and empirically constraining the philosophical concept of a "quale" (mostly Chapter 2, 3 & 8), all proposals regarding conceptual foundations for the overall theory (2 & 5), all of the neurophenomenological case-studies used to test and refine it (4 & 7), and all remarks of a more general or methodological character (1 & 8). In particular, the present Pr