AAP2010 Abstracts


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Title Dr
First Name Wolfgang
Surname Fasching
Institution University of Vienna (Austria)
Title of Paper The Subject as Presence
Select a Stream Philosophy of Mind
Abstract Experiences have a "first-person ontology", i.e. they exist by being subjectively experienced. Yet what is this "first person" or subject who "has" the experiences? Today, philosophers are quite reluctant to posit a "self"-entity that would be the bearer or owner of its experiences. Rather, the "co-subjectivity" of experiences is usually understood as being constituted by relations between the experiences instead of a common relation they all share to one and the same experiencing subject. Yet how much sense does this make if each experience only exists as being subjectively experienced – i.e. as being experienced by a respective subject – in the first place? My present experience is experienced by me completely irrespective of the relations it might have to other experiences. It is necessary to first understand what this experiencing "I" of my present experience is before one can ask what it might mean that several succeeding experiences are experienced by the same "I". In this paper I will suggest that this "I" is nothing but consciousness – yet not in the sense of the experiences, but rather as their presence: While current philosophy of mind predominantly treats consciousness as consisting of subjectively given phenomena (“experiences”) (so that the unity of consciousness can only consist in interrelations between these phenomena), I will claim that in its fundamental sense consciousness is not some special phenomenon which is present to us, but precisely presence itself of any phenomena whatsoever. Synchronically and diachronically, manifold experiences are presented in one and the same consciousness, whose oneness is not reducible to relations between the experiences but rather forms the dimension in which they, together with all their interrelations, have their existence in the first place. This taking place of presence of contents (and not some agglomeration of such contents) is what "I" fundamentally am.