The I: A dimensional account

I have a clear idea of what it means that I have experiences in the past or future, and it does not seem to mean that experiences take place that possess certain content-characteristics, but simply and irreducibly that I experience them – i.e. that they are, at the time of their occurrence, experien...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Fasching, W. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media B.V. 2021
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Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
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Summary:I have a clear idea of what it means that I have experiences in the past or future, and it does not seem to mean that experiences take place that possess certain content-characteristics, but simply and irreducibly that I experience them – i.e. that they are, at the time of their occurrence, experientially present to me –, whatever their contents may be. So the central question regarding personal identity is: What is this “I” to whom the experiences are present, and what is the nature of its identity across changing experiences? Following Zahavi, I suggest that the subject is not to be conceived as a merely postulated trans-experiential entity but has its very being in experiential presence itself. Yet the question is how to conceive of this presence. When we understand it as a property or quality of the experiences (as Zahavi seems to do), the problem is that every experience that has ever been experienced possesses this property, and so it cannot account for what it means that some experiences are experienced by me and not some other subject. In contrast, I suggest (following Klawonn’s “I-dimension” theory) understanding experiential presence not as a property of the experiences but as a dimension which is able to comprise many experiences and to abide as identical through their change – an idea that can also be found in some formulations of Zahavi’s, but which he does not distinguish with the necessary clarity from the quality account. © 2020, The Author(s).
ISBN:15687759 (ISSN)
DOI:10.1007/s11097-020-09697-9