Roessler Attention and the Self An Appreciation of C

The Sub ject of Con scious ness is a rich, strik ingly orig i nal and ambi tious work. It makes an impor tant and timely con tri bu tion to cur rent debates on a num ber of issues which over the last few years have been tak ing cen tre stage in the phi los o phy of mind: for exam ple, self-consciousness, selec tive atten tion and the nature of bodily aware ness. What makes this achieve ment some what unusual, and all the more remark able, is that The Sub ject of Con scious ness was pub lished thirty years ago (Evans, 1970). The reviews it received at the time ranged from the hos tile to the deri sory — one of the more pos i tive com ments was Dennett’s remark that the book was ‘cou ra geously unfash ion able’(Dennett, 1971, p. 180). Per haps partly as a result of this ini tial recep tion, the book has been under-utilized, to say the least. In ret ro spect, I think it is clear that none of the review ers was really able to rec og nize the sig nif i cance of the issues dis cussed in the book, let alone do jus tice to the the ory it devel ops. What they cer tainly failed to appre ci ate is the imag i na tive and sure-footed way in which Evans draws on, and engages with, psy cho log i cal work on atten tion (espe cially T. Ribot and Wil liam James). More over, the book is open-minded in another respect. As the pref ace states, while its author is some one ‘work ing, broadly speak ing, within the ana lyt i cal tra di tion’ (p. 11), there are many points of con tact with phe nom en ol ogy. The reviews sug gest that in the early sev en ties, this may have been enough to con vince many that the book could be, at best, cou ra geously unfash ion able. So one of the pur poses of this appre ci a tion is to put the record straight, as it were, and give due rec og ni tion to what I think is a bril liant work. More impor tantly, how ever, I want to sug gest that there is much that can be gained from tak ing Evans’ views seri ously. The cen tral the sis of the book might be called the Expe ri en tial Self-Awareness claim: