The Bodily Self

Description

Essays on the role of the body in self-consciousness, showing that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness.

These essays explore how the rich and sophisticated forms of self-consciousness with which we are most familiar—as philosophers, psychologists, and as ordinary, reflective individuals—depend on a complex underpinning that has been largely invisible to students of the self and self-consciousness. José Luis Bermúdez, extending the insights of his groundbreaking 1998 book, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, argues that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness, and that these more primitive forms of self-consciousness persist in ways that frame self-conscious thought. They extend throughout the animal kingdom, and some are present in newborn human infants.

Bermúdez makes the case that these primitive forms of self-awareness can indeed be described as forms of self-consciousness, arguing that they share certain structural and epistemological features with full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness. He offers accounts of certain important classes of states of nonconceptual content, including the self-specifying dimension of visual perception and the content of bodily awareness, considering how they represent the self. And he explores the general role of nonconceptual self-consciousness in our cognitive and affective lives, examining in several essays the relation between nonconceptual awareness of our bodies and what has been called our “sense of ownership” for our own bodies.Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Sources ix
Introduction: Understanding the Bodily Self 1
1 Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness and Cognitive Science 27
2 Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View 53
3 The Sources of Self-Consciousness 77
4 The Elusiveness Thesis, Immunity to Error through Misidentification, and Privileged Access 97
5 The Phenomenology of Bodily Awareness 125
6 Bodily Awareness and Self-Consciousness 155
7 Bodily Ownership, Bodily Awareness, and Knowledge without Observation 183
8 Ownership and the Space of the Body 203
9 Bodily Ownership, Psychological Ownership, and Psychopathology 233
10 The Bodily Self, Commonsense Psychology, and the Springs of Action 257
Afterword: Looking Ahead 289
Index 297José Luis Bermúdez is Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He is the coeditor of The Body and the Self (MIT Press) and the author of The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press) and several other books, including most recently Understanding “I”: Language and Thought.US

Additional information