Seyyed Ali Hosseini
Abstract
In the peripatetic philosophy, there are two views on self-awareness: the idea that claims self-awareness depends on the cognition of other things (cognition-dependent self-awareness) ...
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In the peripatetic philosophy, there are two views on self-awareness: the idea that claims self-awareness depends on the cognition of other things (cognition-dependent self-awareness) and the views that state self-awareness is a permanent phenomenon and can be directly accessed through introspection. The former idea is often attributed to Aristotle and the latter opinion stated by Avicenna who believed in the inseparability of human nature and self-awareness. Although Aquinas was a proponent of cognition-dependent self-awareness, he tried to preserve the benefits of the opponent view (eg. Preserving first person perspective, our introspective intuitions and ontological self-identity) and reduce deficiencies and ambiguities of Aristotle’s theory by proposing Habitual and actual self-awareness. In my view, he was somehow successful in the second task, but he couldn’t pass some objections on cognition-dependent self-awareness and benefit from the consequences of the first one due to the purported gap between the unconscious habitual self-awareness and the conscious actual one.
