The Philosophy of Reading as First Philosophy: A Podcast.

“Girl with a Book,” by Alexander Deineka (1934)

In “The Philosophy of Reading as First Philosophy,” Robert Hanna argues as follows:

You, the reader of this very sentence, are consciously reading this very sentence from left to right here and now.

Dear Reader, please now read the first sentence of this essay again, this time (even) more slowly and carefully. Obviously, insofar as you read it, it’s true. Moreover, your belief in its truth is sufficiently justified by the intrinsically compelling evidence yielded by the phenomenology—i.e., the subjectively experienced intentional performance, intentional content, and specific qualitative characters—of your conscious act or process of reading it. The sentence cannot read itself, because it’s not conscious; and nobody else but you consciously read that very sentence in the same way, at the same time, and in the same place, that you did. On the contrary to both of those, because the sentence is in English you consciously read it from left to right, and you also consciously read it right here and now, just as the sentence says. Even if nothing else in the world had existed but that sentence and your consciously reading it from left to right here and now; even if you had consciously read that sentence in a dream; or even if an evil scientist had somehow produced in you a hallucination of your consciously reading that sentence: it would still be true, and your belief in its truth would still be sufficiently justified by the intrinsically compelling evidence yielded by the phenomenology of your conscious act or process of reading it. There are no epistemic gaps between you, the reader of the first sentence of this essay, and your consciously reading that very sentence. So you have authentic, skepticism-proof, empirical or a posteriori knowledge of it. Or in René Descartes’s technical terminology, you have clear, distinct, and certain intuitive knowledge of it. Moreover, given the fact that you have authentic, skepticism-proof, empirical or a posteriori knowledge of the first sentence of this essay, Dear Reader, at least twelve other truths also follow self-evidently from it.

1. Therefore, you exist.

2. Therefore, you are conscious.

3. Since you can tell the difference between your left and your right, between now and elsewhen, and also between here and elsewhere, therefore you are an egocentrically-centered, conscious subject locally embedded in orientable spacetime.

4. Therefore, you are also embodied.

5. Therefore, your embodied consciousness exists as locally embedded in orientable spacetime.

6. Therefore, your embodied conscious act or process of reading the first sentence of this essay also exists.

7. Therefore, you also possess a capacity for consciously reading legible sentences like the first sentence of this essay.

8. Therefore, legible sentences also exist, both as types and as tokens of those types instantiated in actual spacetime.

9. Therefore, legible texts exist, both as types and as tokens of those types instantiated in actual spacetime.

10. Therefore, the manifestly real external spacetime world that contains both types and tokens of legible texts exists.

11. Therefore not only you, an egocentrically-centered, embodied conscious subject locally embedded in orientable spacetime, possessing the capacity for reading, exist, but also the manifestly real external spacetime world that contains both types and tokens of legible texts, exists.

12. Because I, R.H., consciously wrote the first sentence of this essay, but you, Dear Reader, who are not R.H., consciously read the first sentence of this essay, therefore at least two conscious subjects, who are communicating intersubjectively by means of writing and reading, exist in the manifestly real spacetime world that contains both types and tokens of legible texts.

You can find an accessible but also fully detailed podcast on Hanna’s “The Philosophy of Reading as First Philosophy,” created by Scott Heftler and other friends of Philosophy Without Borders, HERE.

And you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the full text of “The Philosophy of Reading as First Philosophy” by clicking on the Download tab directly below.

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