Christopher Peacocke’s The Mirror of the World (2014) is largely about self-consciousness. Peacocke distinguishes “reflective” self-consciousness from other kinds of self-consciousness. Since my dissertation is about reflective reasoning, I want to try to understand reflective self-conscious — I am especially interested in what Peacocke means by ‘reflective’.
1. Peacocke’s Reflection
When someone says ‘reflection’ you might think of mirrors and of light reflecting off of them. Or, if you’re like me, you might think of conscious, deliberate reasoning. Peacocke thinks that these two notions of reflection are similar.†
For example, we explain someone’s appearance in a mirror in terms of their appearance. After all, their appearance in a mirror just is a reflection of their appearance.
And when we reflect on a thought, Peacocke thinks that something similar is happening: we explain a state of reflection in therms of the thought being reflected. And that is because the reflected state just is a reflection of that thought. So when you just reflected about what someone looks like in a mirror, your reflective state was a reflection of the thought of what someone looks like in a mirror.
2. Peacocke’s Reflective Self-consciousness
I found myself puzzled by Peacocke’s ‘reflection’. But when I remembered that his use of ‘reflection’ is ultimately about self-consciousness, it began to make more sense. So if you’re puzzled by the mirror reference, then this part might help.
De se
Ugh. Latin. Some academics still use latin terms to explain themselves. Bear with me.
De se just means something like “of oneself”.
† “The reflecting state of the subject is something whose properties, like that of a reflection, are explained by the nature of what is being reflected, something that exists independently of being reflected” (Peacocke, Chapter 9).
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