Inner Awareness: Past and Present

One of the most fundamental divides in contemporary philosophy of consciousness is whether phenomenal consciousness requires some form of self-consciousness. More specifically, disagreement revolves around the “Awareness Principle”: For any subject S and conscious mental state M of S, S is aware of M. We call the relevant awareness of one’s own mental states “inner awareness.” While the Awareness Principle (or some idea in the vicinity) was largely accepted by early phenomenologists and early analytic philosophers, it is much more disputed by contemporary philosophers of mind. In this chapter, we offer a bird’s-eye view of philosophical debates surrounding the Awareness Principle. Our goal is to review the main theoretical options available on the market. We open by distinguishing various versions of the Awareness Principle (§1) before addressing the place of inner awareness in the history of philosophy (§2) and in contemporary debates on consciousness (§3).