From Intimate Sentiment to Pure Self-Consciousness

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>According to Buffier, intimate sentiment is the basis of all human knowledge, and this idea is developed further and in more detail in the writings of Lelarge de Lignac, for whom intimate sentiment or intimate sense is a “pure” sens fondamental. This essay analyzes and critically evaluates their respective accounts of intimate sentiment, considered as contributions to the eighteenth-century debates about self-consciousness and personal identity. Both Buffier and Lignac critically engage with Locke’s philosophy and with his theory of personal identity in particular, linking the notion of a sentiment intime or sens intime to the idea of the self as an immaterial thinking substance or soul. Lignac’s account, however, foreshadows developments in later eighteenth-century theories that do not involve a metaphysical commitment to an immaterial soul.</jats:p>