Reflexive Awareness (Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Self-Awareness)
In four chapters, I conduct a phenomenological and analytical inquiry into the nature of a special sort of reflexive awareness, an awareness of unprojected or unobjectified awareness. The clearest example of this is the awareness that is felt to be in the background of an experience of dissociatively watching oneself. I call this awareness, RA*. It is to be contrasted with two other sorts of reflexive awareness: (i) awareness of the fact that I am now aware (e.g., there is a visual object before me, therefore I must be seeing), (ii) awareness of past awareness, which in being outside present experience is no longer unprojected, but projected in relation to the second-order awareness. I contend that these latter two sorts of reflexive awareness presuppose the occurrence of RA*.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign