Abstract

One of the aims of Matthew Boyle’s book is to provide a defense of the view that the capacity for self-knowledge is of radical significance in virtue of the fact that it transforms the nature of human cognition in general. In Boyle’s view, our engagement with the world is always already an implicitly self-conscious engagement. In this sense, the being of humans is, in Sartre’s terminology, a “being-for-itself”. This fact is meant to explain the possibility of reflective self-knowledge as well as to vindicate the general soundness of our self-understanding as self-determined beings. In the first part of this paper, I am inviting Boyle to say more about how his account of implicit (nonpositional) self-awareness avoids the problem of over-intellectualizing while at the same time characterizing a specifically human capacity. In the second part of the paper, I argue that self-consciousness can only be understood in relation to intersubjectivity; hence our being is not just a “being-for-itself”, but most and foremost a “being-for-others” (or better: “being-with-others”). Finally, in the third part of the paper, I discuss some implications for challenges to the soundness of the first-person perspective.