The Subject of Experience

This anthology collects fourteen of Strawson's papers published between 1997 and 2015, all of them in one way or another about the epistemic and metaphysical status of ‘the subject, the I, the self, the “first person”’ (p. xi). His agenda throughout is to defend a realist, but starkly minimal conception of the self. Strawson's ‘subject’ is an infallibly identifiable object of introspection, but one that does not necessarily persist from one moment at which it is experientially manifest to even the very next. The book's most provocative passages are those in which Strawson describes how an individual subject can come ‘to be aware in the present moment of itself-in-the-present-moment’ (p. 59). In a characteristic early passage, he remarks that ‘if I had to say where I thought ordinary experience imagines the I or self to be, I’d say “Two or three inches behind the eyes, and maybe up a bit”’ (p. 44). Later on, he tries to develop a more carefully articulated account of how self-experience works, but his attempts to distinguish between, e.g. the ‘thetic’ and the ‘non-thetic’, and ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ aspects of self-awareness are less illuminating than the vivid analogies he develops between the type of experience he has in mind and seeing the blueness of the sky, contemplating the luminosity of a flame, or noticing the puzzlingness of a puzzling thought. He occasionally chastens other philosophers (e.g. Gilbert Ryle) for trying to talk authoritatively about the nature of subject-hood before going through the required mental exercises.

Epistemology · Introspection · Linguistics · Metaphysics · Object (grammar) · Psychoanalysis · Self · Skepticism · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications