# The Paradox of Self-Consciousness - Jose Luis Bermudez **Opening (not a real abstract):** The phenomenon of self-consciousness provides one of the enduring themes of philosophy. Many philosophers from the great to the insignificant have thought that a philosophical account of self-consciousness would be an Archimedean point upon which the whole of philosophy might stand. This book has no such pretensions. My concern is solely with understanding the internal articulation of the phenomenon of selfconsciousness. In fact, my concern is primarily with those forms of selfconsciousness that are more primitive, both logically and ontogenetically, than the conceptual and linguistic forms of self-consciousness to which philosophers have traditionally devoted their attention. My concern with these primitive forms of self-consciousness stems from a paradox that strikes hard at traditional understandings of the relation between linguistic self-reference and self-conscious thought. I develop what I term the paradox of self-consciousness in chapter 1. The