Presence Prior to Rationality: A Comparative Analysis of Avicenna's Self-Awareness Theory and Rationalist Accounts of Self-Knowledge

Avicenna’s theory of essential self-awareness (al-shuʿūr bi-al-dhāt) and contemporary rationalist theories of self-knowledge both seek to explain human awareness of oneself, yet they offer fundamentally different accounts of its source and foundation. Avicenna maintains that self-awareness is an immediate, existential mode of awareness that precedes conceptualization, inference, and rational activity. By contrast, rationalist theories—particularly those advanced by Shoemaker, Moran, Stoljar, and Smithies—treat self-knowledge as grounded in rationality, epistemic agency, and the normative structure of the mind. The present study examines the theoretical relationship between these two approaches and evaluates their respective explanatory scope with regard to fundamental self-awareness. Employing a descriptive-analytical and comparative method, the study first reconstructs Avicenna’s theory of essential self-awareness on the basis of six ontological and epistemological criteria. It then analyzes the principal rationalist accounts and compares their explanatory power through the thought experiment of the Flying Man. The findings indicate that both approaches reject the observational model of self-awareness and affirm its non-inferential character; however, they diverge significantly in explaining the origin of such awareness. The principal contribution of this article is the reconstruction of the theoretical relationship between these traditions through a three-layer model consisting of Presence, Reason, and Interpretation. In this framework, Presence constitutes the foundation of fundamental self-awareness, Reason represents the level of rational self-knowledge, and Interpretation denotes the reflective level of self-understanding. This model demonstrates that the two philosophical traditions can be reconstructed within a unified and complementary explanatory framework.