Subjective experience and self-knowledge

Chatton's approach and its problems

Sonja Schierbaum

pp. 143-156

in: Jari Kaukua, Tomáš Ekenberg (eds), Subjectivity and selfhood in medieval and early modern philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

There is a tendency in recent scholarship to take the fourteenth-century debate on the issue of how to account for self-knowledge, that is, for knowledge concerning one's own occurring mental states and acts, as being embedded in the more general debate about how to account for consciousness. My general aim in this paper is to reconsider the extent to which comparing the medieval discussion with contemporary discussions of consciousness can be fruitful. This more general aim should be achieved by focusing on the account of Walter Chatton, a representative of the medieval debate. I argue that Chatton's distinction between two kinds of experience or awareness ultimately fails to play the role he assigns to it, namely to account for propositional self-awareness (awareness that one is in a certain state). If successful, the discussion of Chatton's case helps rendering explicit the limits of comparing medieval conceptions with contemporary conceptions of consciousness more exactly.