期刊名称：Avant : Journal of Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard
印刷版ISSN：2082-7598
电子版ISSN：2082-6710
出版年度：2012
卷号：III
期号：1
出版社：Centre for Philosophical Research
摘要：The problem of subjectivity constitutes one of the most crucial issues in contempo-rary philosophy, especially the philosophy of mind. An attempt to describe the structure and the role of conscious experience may help us to lay theoretical grounds for further research on this particular matter. When it comes to under-standing the subject, which for a long time was based on Cartesian philosophy, . the area of subjective experiences was regarded as an objective base for systematic enquires into the human mind (Bremer 2008: 43). According to Descartes, during the process of introspection we obtain the so-called privileged access to our (men-tal) states and, thus, we cannot be wrong about them. This infallibility was suppo-sedly supported by the fact that we always experience our states as our own and from the first-person perspective. The role of personal reports as reliable indica-tors for a theory of human consciousness was also founded on 19th-century psy-chology, which continued to use the method of introspection. Therefore, the first-person perspective in the research on consciousness was for a long time an ac-cepted approach in the traditional philosophy o f subject . However, at present there is a tendency to renounce this kind of an approach to subjectivity. Introspec-tion has been recognized as an unreliable, and above all, insufficient way of de-scribing the human mind. Together with the progress in neuroscience and the widespread coo peration between philosophers and empirical researchers, in re-cent years the so-called reductive approach to subjectivity has gained popularity According to this approach, subject's mental life and the subject itself can be re-duced to a particular experience generated by neural activity (Metzinger 2004), or the very existence of the experience of self can be questioned (Prinz 2012). We are going to look at two philosophical propositions that annihilate the subject in some sen se, and consider whether the issue of subjectivity has been resolved or not
