Published in Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 1/1, 2002, 7-26. Please quote from published version First-person thoughts and embodied self-awareness: Some reflections on the relation between recent analytical philosophy and phenomenology i Dan Zahavi Danish University of Education ABSTRACT: The article examines some of the main theses about self-awareness developed in recent analytic philosophy of mind (especially the work of Bermúdez), and points to a number of striking overlaps between these accounts and the ones to be found in phenomenology. Given the real risk of unintended repetitions, it is argued that it would be counterproductive for philosophy of mind to ignore already existing resources, and that both analytical philosophy and phenomenology would profit from a more open exchange. In recent years the issues of subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness, and selfhood have once again become central and respectable topics in analytical philosophy. After a long period of neobehaviorist functionalism it is nowadays almost commonplace to argue that the experiential or first-personal dimension of consciousness must be taken seriously, since an important and non-negligible feature of consciousness is the way in which it is experienced by the subject. Given this realization, how and where should one start the investigation? One possibility -- apparently favored by the first generation of analytical revivalists (Searle and Nagel) -- is to start from scratch. That is, rather than making use of results already obtained, one attempts to investigate the experiential dimension on one’s own (with a bit of help from common sense psychology). While there might be something laudable about this endeavor, there is however also a real risk involved; the risk of unintended repetition and reformulation. For example, there are themes in Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986) which strongly resemble discussions in Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie (1912) and in Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I (1976, original: 1913), and there is a striking resemblance between ideas in Searle’s Intentionality (1983) and in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1984, original: 1900-1). Lately there seems to be a growing awareness of the limitations of this approach. That is, while it is still acknowledged that the investigation of consciousness has to take the first-person perspective and the experiential dimension seriously, it is now realized 1) that this investigation calls for a disciplined approach, i.e., a reliable methodology, and 2) that there are existing resources to draw upon, which contain rich descriptive and systematic accounts of consciousness; resources which shouldn’t be ignored. Who is it that is being rediscovered in these years? Mainly two figures: Kant and James. Let me provide a few examples: First, in his recent book Kant and the Mind Andrew Brook writes: “Like other philosophers, Kant was interested primarily in four questions about the mind: What can it do? How does it do it? What is its awareness of itself like? And what is it like? [...] Not only have Kant’s discoveries