"The Transcendence of the Ego" is a short work by Jean Paul Sartre, written in 1937 and which presents us a phenomenological study of human consciousness. This work marked Sartre's break from the teachings of Edmund Husserl.
He rejects the idea of regarding the ego as a part of our consciousness and doesn't place the ego inside of it. He rejects bothformal and material presence of the ego in our consciousness and tries to prove that any ego is an external part of our consciousness like anybody else's one. It can be concluded from the following statements that our emotions, my states and even our ego itself, cease to be our exclusive property. Phenomenology places states, emotions outside the consciousness and this way they become nothing but transcendent objects. As objects they can not penetrate into the interior unity of our consciousness. This gives us the possibility to think that in contrast to previous theories stated that people couldn't not feel same emotion same way that there is nothing impenetrable about others, except for their consciousness. The consciousness stays the only absolutely impenetrable for others. A consciousness can't conceive another one but itself. The transcendental sphere becomes accessible only to phenomenology which regards it as a sphere of absolute existence and pure spontaneities which determined themselves. The ego doesn't own a consciousness, it isn't inside of it.
According to Sartre consciousness is unstable by its nature. The basic characteristic of consciousness is its dynamicity, spontaneity, and freedom. He follows Husserl's principle of the intentionality of consciousness. He states that all forms of consciousness are somehow intentional. Imagination, feelings need something to appear. They are the ways of relating to the world and in this relation consists the intentionality
The spontaneity doesn't emanate from the ego, it directs to it. The one of the main thesis of the work states that "transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity". Sartre puts practical function of the ego about its theoretical function and he is sure that "perhaps the essential role of the ego is to mask from consciousness its very spontaneity". It affects not the ideal unity but the real instant unity of the moment. Therefore our consciousness sometimes tends to accept the ego for the false representation of itself. But even in this case the ego doesn't penetrate the consciousness but vise versa the part consciousness absorbs itself in the ego. All thanks to the ego it's possible for us to make a distinction between possible and the real, between appearance and being, between the willed and the undergone as there is no such a difference for the consciousness. Escaping the ego by consciousness can sweep all the barriers and limits hiding consciousness from itself. Then consciousness is suddenly anguished by fear of itself inherent to pure consciousness.
Sartre states that only absolute consciousness exists as absolute. But if we put the ego inside of the consciousness, we will break the unity by opposing the consciousness owning the ego to other ones.
According to Sartre, the phenomenologist made a big step on the perception of the human nature and paid necessary attention to the agonies, suffering and rebellions of the human. The last contradiction can be overcome if the extract the ego notion from the consciousness and put it outside it. He considers enough to recognize "the me be contemporaneous with the World" to escape the subject-object duality which's bothered a lot of philosophers. The World doesn't create ME, the ME doesn't create the World. They are both objects according to his teaching o for absolute consciousness and are connected by its virtue. Only extraction the I or the ego from it we can get rid of the subject and to attain absolute consciousness. This absolute consciousness is an absolute source, reason and only explanation for existence. And it establishes the relations of absolute freedom between the Me and the World.
David Armstrong, an Australian philosopher who has been deeply influential in metaphysics, epistemology is the author of "The Mind Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction". That is a question which's been on the focus of attention of many scalars and philosophers, and which's became central for David.
The book illuminates the great philosophical debate on the problem of mind-body dualism starting with the ancient scholars, such as Descartes and the reaction of Anglo-Saxon philosophers to his teachings.
He leans on materialism in his theory of mind and body functioning. Armstrong believes that the mind is a physical bodily function, rather than existing as a separate entity that others describe as the human soul. He calls physical anything that appears in Physics. State materialism depends on a causal analysis of concepts of mental states and processes. Psychological concepts (for example, the concepts of belief and sensory pain) are defined in terms of the ordinary physical causes of belief states and pain states. The Cartesian view states that it possible to identify mental goings-on, in particular sensations and perceptions, with purely physical brain-processes. But the problem with introspection classification appears here. The possibility to bring back the retrospection makes it possible to classify it as brain process. It could be a process where the brain scans itself. But from the other side if introspection was a purely material process, it should be possible for it to go wrong and deliver the wrong result. Thought it doesn't which bring out certain disparity.
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