I give a brief overview of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford 2024), to introduce the author-meets-critics symposium to follow.

In Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle offers a Sartrean account of prereflective self-awareness to explain the essential link between self-consciousness and rationality, moving away from standard Kantian interpretations that he claims presuppose rather than explain this connection. I argue that Boyle’s account provides useful tools for re-interpreting Kant’s claim that the “I think” must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. I also aim to show that Boyle’s model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant’s account (construed as a kind of prereflective consciousness) has the resources to address this challenge.

After presenting Boyle’s appeal to the Sartrean notion of nonpositional self-awareness in explaining Evans’ “transparency fact” concerning self-knowledge, I argue that his explanation suffers a certain instability. To the extent that nonpositional self-awareness is taken to be a matter of first-order ‘transparent’ orientation to the world, Boyle’s suggestion concerning the character of explicit positional self-knowledge is compromised. On the other hand, to the extent that nonpositional awareness is regarded as a form of genuine self-awareness, his explanation overintellectualizes first-order mental states. I conclude by raising questions regarding Boyle’s success in providing a viable alternative to epistemic accounts of basic self-knowledge.

In Chapter 5 of Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle examines an “anti-Egoist” challenge to my reflective knowledge that I am thinking, which says all I really know is that thinking is occurring. Boyle replies that I know something more, namely that a subject is thinking. Even so, he concedes that traditional Egoists like Descartes go too far in claiming reflective knowledge that an object is thinking. However, these comments argue that there is no stable middle ground between Cartesian Egoism and Anti-Egoism. If I know that I am thinking, then I know that an object is thinking.

I reply to three critical discussions of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford, 2024). The replies discuss the basic structure of my “reflectivist” account of self-knowledge, the bearing of my account on the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the question of how to respond to Hume’s challenge to our entitlement to attribute our thoughts to a single self, the relation between awareness of ourselves as conscious subjects and knowledge of our existence as embodied objects, and the relation of my views on self-awareness to the views of Immanuel Kant.

We are self-conscious creatures thrown into a world, which is not of our making. What is the connection between being self-conscious and being related to an objective world? The Practical Self argues that self-consciousness requires faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking and that this faith is sustained by a set of practices which relate us to a world of others.

The Practical Self offers a new and gripping account of the conditions on being self-conscious subjects. Gomes argues that self-conscious subjects are required to have faith in themselves as the agents of thinking, sustained and supported by worldly practices. I argue that that Gomes leaves open either theoretical or alternative practical grounds to justify being the agents of thinking and so does not motivate an appeal to faith as the mode of assent. And I ask whether we can make available an alternative account of the tight relation between communal practices and self-consciousness that preserves it, absent faith.

Anil Gomes argues in The Practical Self that we must have faith that we are doxastic agents, sustained by commitment to an objective social world. I argue Gomes needs evidence he denies himself. Descartes, whom Gomes rejects, provides what’s missing: we gain defeasible evidence both for objectivity and agency by perceiving them clearly. I reconstruct overlooked Cartesian insights, including his Commonsense Realism. Finally, while Gomes invokes Lichtenberg’s “lightning” to question doxastic agency, I show that Lichtenberg equally addressed passivity in creative insight. The lesson: we need evidence for passivity no less than agency and objectivity—and Cartesian clarity provides it.

The problem at the center of Gomes’ The Practical Self is how the self-conscious reflective subject can come understand herself, and establish, that she is in an objective world. Its proposed solution lies in practically, not theoretically, grounded assent, sustained by our conversation with others. This critical response to the book aims to do three things. First, to encourage people to read it. Second, to scrutinize Gome’s own recommendation for the best route to take in dealing with this problem. Third, to ask whether there is a shorter route.

The Practical Self begins with Descartes’s withdrawal into isolation. And it ends where the Meditations end: in a world of others, offering objections and replies, holding one another to account. But its route from self-consciousness to objectivity is decidedly not Cartesian—it denies that we can establish a connection between self-consciousness and the world on theoretical grounds alone. Instead, it argues that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking and that our assent to this claim is sustained by practices which relate us to an objective world. Elliot Samuel Paul’s thoughtful comments identify two gaps in this argument and argue that Descartes’s account of agency and objectivity is needed to bridge them. The route from self-consciousness and objectivity needs supplementation with Cartesian resources.