Consciousness and the Self New Essays

'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.' These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood and the epistemic access to one's own thoughts, desires or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.

Introduction: consciousness and the self; 1. Awareness and identification of self David Rosenthal; 2. Self-representationalism and the explanatory gap Uriah Kriegel; 3. Thinking about the self John Perry; 4. Ordinary self-consciousness Lucy O'Brien; 5. Waiting for the self Jesse Prinz; 6. I think I think, therefore I am - I think: skeptical doubts about self-knowledge Fred Dretske; 7. Knowing what I want Alex Byrne; 8. Self-ignorance Eric Schwitzgebel; 9. Personhood and consciousness Sydney Shoemaker; 10. My non-narrative, non-forensic Dasein: the first and second self Owen Flanagan.

JeeLoo Liu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (2006).
John Perry is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (2001), Identity, Personal Identity and the Self (2002) and a number of other books.