Waterloo/Peacocke/Kitcher version KANT, SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-REFERENCE Andrew Brook Introduction As is well-known, Castañeda (1966, 1967), Shoemaker (1968), Perry (1979), Evans (1982) and others urge that awareness of self has peculiar features. It is less well-known that some of these peculiarities were discovered as early as 1781 and the Critique of Pure Reason. 1 Two of the key peculiarities are that, 1. In certain kinds of awareness of self, first-person indexicals (I, me, my, mine) cannot be analysed out in favour of anything else, in particular anything description like, and that, 2. In such cases, awareness of self is via what Shoemaker calls self-reference without identification. One can be aware of something as oneself without identifying it (or anything) as oneself via properties that one has ascribed to the thing. (2) is often taken to be closely related to another putative peculiarity of awareness of self that Shoemaker (1970) calls 3. Immunity to error through misidentification, the idea that in some situations, we cannot become aware of a person by being aware of certain experiences, take that person to be oneself, and be wrong. Shoemaker claims to have found the core of the idea in Wittgenstein (1933-4: 66-70). There are questions to be asked about each of these three ideas. About (1): Is there not an ineliminable indexical element in most or all reference? About (3): Is there any such immunity and, if there is, how closely it is linked to (2) self-reference without identification? Certainly (3) has received a lot of attention in recent literature on self-reference and self-awareness; perhaps it has received more attention than it deserves. About (2): Isn’t it the most basic of the three ideas? If (2) is the case, that would on the face of it seem to be enough by itself to produce (1) and (3). These are good questions and we will have something to say about all of them eventually. But 1. I explore the issues in this paper at greater length in Brook 1994: Ch’s 4, 7 and 8. Unless otherwise noted, references to Kant are to the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Akademie pagination using the standard ‘A’ and ‘B’ notation for the first two editions (the only two that Kant prepared himself). A reference to one edition only means that the passage in question appeared only in that edition. Translations start from Norman Kemp Smith’s 1927 translation and Guyer and Woods’ 1998 translation and have been checked against the original text.