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This is exclusively the nature of subjectivity qua consciousness, which is not an object alongside other objects, but rather exists as the manifestation of objects.

In fact, no object is ever intrinsically “about” anything. Naturalism only knows “nature”, as the world of objects, and the question of intentionality then seems to be how certain inner-worldly objects can be “representations” of other inner-worldly objects (which is the project of “naturalisation of intentionality”). This presence-of is not only a fundamental, irreducible phenomenon, but also in a radical sense un-naturalisable. consists in something coming to appearance.

Consciousness essentially takes place as presence-of, i.e. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, this is an inadequate understanding of consciousness, which should instead be defined in terms of presence. In recent philosophy of mind the essentially intentional character of consciousness has become obscured because the latter is predominantly understood in terms of “qualia” or the “what-it-is-like-ness” of mental states, and it is hard to see why such subjective “feels”, of all things, could bestow states with objective reference. This paper discusses the nature of consciousness’ intrinsic intentionality from a transcendental-phenomenological viewpoint. I attempt to supply this missing phenomenology of diachronic self-experience using Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity.” Kierkegaard offers a compelling description of diachronic self-experience that is fully normative in character, one that also offers more parsimonious explanations for certain puzzling features of Episodicity than Strawson’s account does. As an Episodic, Strawson provides lucid descriptions of the episodic self-experience he seeks to defend, but does not furnish the non-reductive phenomenology of diachronicity his account requires if it is to maintain that neither temperament is inherently preferable.

He argues that nothing normatively significant depends upon diachronicity, so Episodics can live fully moral (and fully satisfying) lives.

Galen Strawson has articulated a spectrum of “temporal temperaments,” populated at one end by “Diachronics”, who experience their selves (understood as a “present mental entity”) as persisting across time, and at the other end by “Episodics”, who lack any such sense of temporal extension.