Joost Ziff
University of California, Irvine
Do I think my thoughts or do my thoughts think themselves, arising when they want to, without my say-so? This latter possibility Friedrich Nietzsche forcefully posited in Beyond Good and Evil (1989). Intuitively, it might seem obvious that I think my thoughts and know them well enough. But his argument becomes more plausible once we take into consideration how secure our access to our thoughts is. Many philosophers of mind have argued that our thoughts do not have a distinctive phenomenology: a ‘what it is like’ to experiencing them. Without this phenomenology, we cannot recognize our thoughts directly when we experience them, and thus have to rely on indirect mechanisms. But if our access to our thoughts is only indirect, our access to our thoughts may not be so secure at all. Our thoughts, which initially seemed transparent, now seem opaque. Nietzsche’s account of thinking may be true as a skeptical scenario.
The goal of this paper, however, is not only to set up and explain this skeptical scenario, but to rebut it, thereby making clearer what our role as agents actually is in regards to thinking our thoughts. I do this by focusing on the process by which agents make their thoughts clear in goal-oriented thinking: by working out and expressing their thoughts. A lot of our thoughts likely do not have a distinct phenomenology. But when we are thinking in a goal-oriented or regimented fashion we must spell out our thoughts carefully by verbalizing, drawing, writing, and so forth. In doing this, we make our thoughts clear and distinctly phenomenally conscious, thus rendering the skeptical argument moot.
First, I will explain the dispute around cognitive phenomenology and its distinctness. Second, I will explain a Nietzschean challenge to our agential role in thinking, and how it relates to the phenomenology of thought. Last, I will address the Nietzschean challenge by showing how effortful expression or verbalization makes our cognitive phenomenology distinct.
Chair: Sharon Casu
Time: September 6th, 16:50-17:20
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 