ABSTRACT
Preliminaries To come to grips with Quine on the form of cognition called ‘consciousness’, let us reconfi gure the classical recommendation to ‘Know thyself’. A Quinian way of putting the point might be ‘Nature know thyself’. The latter is at the heart of Quine’s ontological views on the place of the self and its awareness in and as a part of nature:
The reader might get in the spirit of things by contrasting this Quine quotation with Descartes’ cogito : ‘I think therefore I am’. Descartes’ starting point focused on consciousness via thinking about the mind independently of a body and only later does he get to the body. Quine on the other hand starts with nature wherein a part of nature is able to be aware of itself as part of the rest of nature.
