Subjectivity as origin-tracking: a structural account of individuation
Synthese March 23, 2026 Chris Sawyer
Selfhood is often explained either by the felt quality of conscious experience or by the mental representations that allow thinking about oneself in the first person. Both approaches assume that selfhood is a kind of content—either experiential or conceptual—and so miss the underlying organization that makes such content possible. This paper argues that neither the sense of 'for-me-ness' in phenomenology nor the first-person mode of presentation in analytic philosophy can ground how a subject is individuated, because each already relies on an asymmetry built into the system.