Institute for Philosophy

Konzeptionen personaler Identität und die Bedeutung des autobiographischen Gedächtnisses KATJA CRONE Einleitung1 Personen leben nicht nur faktisch in der Zeit, sondern sie haben auch ein spezifisches Bewusstsein ihrer zeitübergreifenden Identität und Existenz. Ich ...

Ideas about freedom and related concepts like autonomy and self-determination play a prominent role in the moral debate about human enhancement interventions. However, there is not a single understanding of freedom available, and arguments referring to freedom are simul- taneously used to argue both for and against enhancement interventions. This gives rise to misunderstandings and polemical arguments. The paper attempts to disentangle the different distinguishable concepts, classifies them and shows how they relate to one another in order to allow for a more structured and clearer debate. It concludes in identi- fying the individual underpinnings and the social condi- tions of choice and decision-making as particularly salient dimensions of freedom in the ethical debate about human enhancement.

The article explores the basic conceptual relationship between social cognition, intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. A much-debated recent approach to social cognition, the so-called interaction theory, is the view that the ability to perceive, understand and interpret the behavior of others relies on interaction in the sense of mutual coordination of the embodied agents involved. It will be shown that this notion of reciprocity is too weak in order to fully account for social understanding. It will be argued that the idea of reciprocity should at least in some cases be conceived of as a stance persons adopt towards each other, which in turn presupposes that they acknowledge each other as self-conscious agents. This view is inspired by an argument originally introduced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

The article explores how persons conceive of themselves as individuals. Often, they attribute personality traits to themselves which they exemplify or justify by reference to former life episodes. According to dominant narrative approaches, this biographical self-understanding is entirely constituted by so-called "self-narratives", that is, the way in which persons construct stories about themselves and their lives. Against this line of thought it will be argued that the self-understanding of persons is not only characterized by narrative structures but also by certain phenomenal as well as invariant features. This will be shown by analyzing a non-narrative sense of self-identity across time, which necessarily grounds biographical self-understanding.

The article deals with the question of whether the particular structure of a collective perspective may be explained in terms of a tacit, pre-reflective awareness of jointness. Schmid's recent approach argues for the assumption of a plural self-awareness that underlies collective attitudes and cooperative behavior. Drawing on semantic arguments as well as empirical data from developmental psychology, Schmid's view will be criticized for having implausible consequences. Instead, it will be argued that an appropriate description of an implicit awareness of "we" has to meet several adequacy conditions such as a tacit self-other distinction, pre-intentional reciprocity and commitment. A minimal framework of mutual awareness of each other as conscious agents supplemented by a "feeling of commitment" will be outlined.

A question that has gone unasked for a long time in Kant research is whether and to what extent, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the central concept of apperception or the so-called transcendental or original self-consciousness implies a form of concrete consciousness beyond purely formal and functional characteristics. It is thought to be entirely uncon-troversial that that which produces objective knowledge and which Kant denoted with the concept of apperception only has transcendentally necessary significance and is entirely inaccessible to concrete consciousness. This deeply entrenched interpretation can be explained by program-matic reasons above all, whereby the lesson of the paralogisms chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason plays an important role. Here Kant shows that there can be no justification for assuming a Cartesian soul that would be accessible to knowledge. This can only make it seem substantially wrong-headed to wish to interpret the consciousness involved in ap-perception, which according to Kant underlies all structured thought, as a form of phenomenal consciousness that could somehow be made apparent from the first-person perspective. One could even argue that the very attempt to locate any phenomenal self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason is contrary to the entire project of the critique of knowledge , since Kant is concerned to justify propositional knowledge through conditions that are independent of experience and can be legitimately applied to the material of empirical intuition. This sort of approach necessitates a strict distinction in the theory between a priori structures on the one hand and empirical or psychological aspects of the consciousness of objects on the other hand—a distinction famously reflected in the Critique of Pure Reason in the sharp terminological oppositions of attributes such as " empirical " and " pure/transcendental " , " a priori " and " a posteri