Matthew Boyle

I reply to three critical discussions of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford, 2024). The replies discuss the basic structure of my “reflectivist” account of self-knowledge, the bearing of my account on the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the question of how to respond to Hume’s challenge to our entitlement to attribute our thoughts to a single self, the relation between awareness of ourselves as conscious subjects and knowledge of our existence as embodied objects, and the relation of my views on self-awareness to the views of Immanuel Kant.

I reply to three critical discussions of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford, 2024). The replies discuss the basic structure of my “reflectivist” account of self-knowledge, the bearing of my account on the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the question of how to respond to Hume’s challenge to our entitlement to attribute our thoughts to a single self, the relation between awareness of ourselves as conscious subjects and knowledge of our existence as embodied objects, and the relation of my views on self-awareness to the views of Immanuel Kant.

To claim that we can acquire a certain kind of knowledge through mere reflection is to claim that the relevant knowledge is already “obscurely” within us even before we reflect, and that we can make this knowledge explicit simply by exercising our power to make this knowledge “distinct”. Many philosophers have claimed that a core part of philosophy draws its material from reflection. But can this vague but appealing conception of the philosophical enterprise be made clear and determinate? And when it is clarified, does it prove defensible? I propose a way of clarifying the reflective conception of philosophy and argue that reflection thus understood is a defensible method of philosophical inquiry. But I also suggest that, once we address the most immediate objections to the reflective conception of philosophical cognition, various deeper difficulties come into view. These difficulties do not show that the reflective conception is mistaken, but they show how much work must be done to develop this conception systematically and to bring it into harmony with other attractive thoughts about the nature of philosophical understanding.

Ich antworte auf sechs kritische Beiträge zu meinem Buch Transparency and Reflection (2024) und seiner vorauseilenden Zusammenfassung in dieser Zeitschrift (2023). In den Antworten geht es um das Verhältnis meiner Ansichten zum Selbstbewusstsein zu denen von Immanuel Kant, um den Begriff des präreflexiven Selbstbewusstseins, der in meinem Ansatz eine entscheidende Rolle spielt, um meine Darstellung der Grundlagen erstpersonalen Denkens, und um verschiedene Fragen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Selbstbewusstsein und dem Bewusstsein anderer Personen.

This is a draft paper written for a workshop honoring John McDowell on the occasion of his retirement. I discuss some remarks McDowell makes about the significance of philosophical “how possible?”-questions and the kind of “constructive philosophy” that seeks straightforwardly to respond to them. I describe a dilemma McDowell raises for the interpretation of such questions, and I seek to show that this dilemma can be avoided. At stake are questions about the positive value of philosophical inquiry, about whether philosophy can make “progress”, and about what our attitude should be toward so-called “quietism” in philosophy.

I consider a debate between Martha Nussbaum and Agnes Callard about the justifiability of anger as a response to perceived mistreatment: Nussbaum argues that anger involves a desire for “payback” that is fundamentally irrational, wheras Callard, while admitting that anger involves a desire for payback, defends this response as rational in its context. I argue that, rather than taking sides in this dispute, we should recognize the positions taken by Callard and Nussbaum as giving reflective expressions to two standpoints on anger that are necessarily available to anyone capable of experiencing anger. I go on to suggest – drawing on some thoughts from Sartre – that standpoints analogous to those of Callard and Nussbaum are possible for a range of human emotions, and that recognizing the possibility of this double standpoint can teach us important lessons about the validity of emotional responses and the limits of such validity.

According to a tradition reaching back at least as far as Aristotle, human beings are set apart from other terrestrial creatures by their rationality. Other animals, according to this tradition, are capable of sensation and appetite, but they are not capable of thought, the kind of activity characteristic of the rational part of the soul. Human beings, by contrast, are rational animals, and an understanding of our minds must begin from a recognition of this distinctiveness. For, the tradition holds, the presence of rationality does not just add one more power to the human mind, or increase the scope and efficacy of mental powers already present in nonrational creatures. Rather, rationality transforms all of our principal mental powers, making our minds different in kind from the minds of nonrational animals.

Human beings who have mastered a natural language are self-conscious creatures: they can think, and indeed speak, about themselves in the first person. This dissertation is about the significance of this capacity: what it is and what difference it makes to our minds. My thesis is that the capacity for self-consciousness is essential to rationality, the thing that sets the minds of rational creatures apart from those of mere brutes. This, I argue, is what Kant was getting at in a famous passage of his Critique of Pure Reason, when he claimed that a representation which could not be “accompanied with the ‘I think’” would be “nothing to me” as a thinking being. I call this claim the Kantian thesis. My dissertation seeks to explain and defend the Kantian thesis, to show how it entails that the advent of self-consciousness brings with it a new kind of mind, and to sketch the implications of this point for a philosophy of mind that seeks to understand the minds of rational creatures. This involves, on the one hand, an investigation of the kinds of capacities that characterize a rational creature, and, on the other hand, an argument connecting reason with self-consciousness. I show that a rational creature, in the interesting sense, is one capable of conceptual representation, and I argue that (1) to represent conceptually is to represent in a way that decouples information from any particular context or purpose, (2) this special form of representation is possible only in a creature that can reflect explicitly on grounds for judging a proposition true, and (3) to have this capacity to reflect explicitly on grounds is necessarily to have the crux of self- consciousness. If this is right, then the representations of a rational creature must differ from those of a nonrational creature not merely in complexity but in kind. The dissertation sketches the implications of this point for various forms of naturalism and reductionism in the philosophy of mind, for debates about how to explain “first person authority,” and for our understanding of the sort of failure of self-consciousness involved in self-deception.

The capacity of human knowers to turn their cognitive powers upon themselves has long fascinated philosophers. My book Transparency and Reflection grew out of an attempt to comprehend a fundamental thought from Kant about the significance of this capacity for self-consciousness: namely, that it transforms the general character of human knowing, giving rise to a distinctively rational form of cognition and supplying the basis for a distinctively philosophical understanding of our own minds and of the world with which they engage. In seeking to understand these Kantian ideas, however, I found myself struggling with difficulties that led me to re-think my approach, moving away from a Kantian formulation of these points and toward one inspired by ideas from Sartre. In the present essay, I describe the difficulties that led me from Kant to Sartre, and I also seek to explain how, in spite of this shift in perspective, my book bears out various fundamental Kantian thoughts about the significance of human self-consciousness.

This book argues that we misunderstand the importance of the topic of self-knowledge if we conceive of it merely as a puzzle about how we can know a special range of facts. Instead, we should regard it as an inducement to reflect on the nature of the relevant facts themselves, and of the kind of mind of which they hold. In this sense, the interest of the topic of self-knowledge is metaphysical rather than merely epistemological: its primary importance lies in the light it can shed on what our minds are, rather than just on how we come to know certain facts about them. Appreciating this point puts us in a position to see a link between debates about how we know our own minds and the dark but intriguing idea that Jean-Paul Sartre expressed in his remark that, for a human being, "to exist is always to assume its being" in a way that implies "an understanding of human reality by itself." An implication of thus Sartrean standpoint on self-awareness, I argue, is that our primary form of self-awareness must be transparent: its focus must be, not on ourselves, but on aspects of the non-mental world presented in a way that is informed by an implicit self-awareness. Nevertheless-as I go on to argue-we are necessarily capable of transforming this implicit self-awareness, through reflection, into an explicit understanding of ourselves and our own mental states.

It is sometimes claimed that each of us has a special ‘first-person perspective’ on our own mind. It is also sometimes claimed that each of us confronts questions about what to do from a distinctively ‘agent-centred’ standpoint. This essay argues that the analogies between these claims are not just superficial, but point to the importance, in both cases, of a representational structure that sets ‘first-person’ awareness apart from external or ‘third-person’ awareness. I describe this structure and show its importance in clarifying some well-known claims about the importance of the agent’s standpoint in ethics.

Sartre’s obscure but evocative remarks on bodily awareness have often been cited, but, I argue, they have rarely been understood. This paper aims to bring the connection between Sartre's views on bodily awareness and his more general distinction between “positional” and “non-positional” consciousness. Sartre’s main claim about bodily awareness, I argue, is that our primary awareness of our own bodies is a form of non-positional consciousness. I show that he is right about this, and right to think that recognizing this point is crucial to understanding what it is for something to be my body.

A venerable philosophical tradition holds that we rational creatures are distinguished by our capacity for a special sort of mental agency or self-determination: we can “make up” our minds about whether to accept a given proposition. But what sort of activity is this? Many contemporary philosophers accept a Process Theory of this activity, according to which a rational subject exercises her capacity for doxastic self-determination only on certain discrete occasions, when she goes through a process of consciously deliberating about whether P and concludes by “making a judgment”, thereby bringing about a change in what she believes. I argue that this conception of our control over our beliefs implies an unacceptable picture of the agency we exercise in judging, and of the relation of such agency to the condition of belief itself. I suggest that the beliefs of a rational creature are themselves “acts of reason”, which reflect the capacity for doxastic self-determination in their very nature, not merely in certain facts about how they can originate.