Abstract
In this chapter, we explore the role of habit in giving shape to conscious experience and importantly to our pre-reflective awareness of ourselves which includes the sense of mineness that accompanies our conscious experience. For the most part, discussions in philosophy of mind and phenomenology concerning pre-reflective self-awareness are focused on determining the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and selfhood. For this reason perhaps, the existence of pre-reflective self-awareness is usually appealed to as evidence for a form of selfhood that appears within conscious experience as a component of its synchronic unity. In this chapter, however, we will concern ourselves with the pre-reflective sense of ourselves that appears in conscious experience as it pertains to the diachronic unity of the self—that is the sense of a unitary self as existing over the course of multiple episodic experiences. Our aim is to provide a phenomenological account of the relationship between the minimal, pre-reflective sense of self and what is often termed the ‘narrative self.’ We will argue that habits play a role in preserving the significance of our past in our present experience and in unifying our experience as a self for whom the world is present across disparate episodes of experience.
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Acknowledgements
Shaun Gallagher acknowledges the Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Award and the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant, Minds in Skilled Performance. DP170102987, for supporting his research on this topic.
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Butler, M.G., Gallagher, S. (2018). Habits and the Diachronic Structure of the Self. In: Altobrando, A., Niikawa, T., Stone, R. (eds) The Realizations of the Self. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94700-6_4
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