The Ubiquity of Self-Awareness

Two claims have been prominent in recent discussions of self-consciousness. One is that first-person reference or first-person thinking is irreducible (the Irreducibility Thesis), and the other is that an awareness of self accompanies all conscious states, at least those through which one refers to something. The latter--here termed the Ubiquity Thesis--has long been associated with philosophers like Fichte, Brentano, and Sartre, though each articulated his own version of the claim. More recently, variants have been defended by Dieter Henrich (1970) and Manfred Frank (1991, 1995a, 1995b). In Frank's words: