FROM CONSCIOUSNESS TO SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

The road that human beings traverse from infancy to maturity runs from consciousness to self-consciousness. It begins with a human newborn who is conscious, whose waking state is one of awareness, and ends with the same entity who is self-conscious, who can conceive of herself from the first person. The newborn has no concepts at all, and the mature person has a wealth of concepts, including a self-concept. I shall off er a sketch of this road from (nonconceptual) consciousness to ( conceptual) self-consciousnessness. Along the way, I shall argue that, pace Bermudez, (Bermudez 1998, 45) we neither need nor have "nonconceptual first-person contents."