The author argues that the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness supports the substance view of the self over deflationary or eliminativist theories. Drawing on accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness, and self-acquaintance, the paper contends that subjects are aware of themselves as the one individual who has many experiences, as the bearer and unifier of those experiences. This minimal self-awareness reveals the subject as present and known, giving reason to favor the substance view over the bundle or minimal self view. The argument demonstrates how debates on the phenomenology of self-awareness and the metaphysics of selfhood intersect.
Strong representationalism, a dominant view in philosophy of perception, comes in reductive and non-reductive forms, typically paired with realist and irrealist commitments respectively. This paper develops a simple, largely empirical argument against the realist reductive version and then extends that argument to cover irrealist representationalism. The argument targets the core claims of these positions without relying on specialized proprietary concepts, instead drawing on empirical considerations to challenge their adequacy.