A small standing question

The Essential Indexical is a journal devoted to a single philosophical thread: the irreducibility of the first-person standpoint, and what its irreducibility might tell us about consciousness, agency, and reference.

The journal takes its name from John Perry’s 1979 essay The Problem of the Essential Indexical, in which Perry argued that words like I, here, and now cannot be paraphrased into purely descriptive language without loss. We treat this as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The essays gathered here pursue what follows from it.

What we publish

Long-form essays in the editorial tradition: careful, slow, willing to sit with a problem rather than dispatch it. We are interested in the points at which a technical question in philosophy of mind opens onto something close to ordinary experience — and at which an ordinary observation, pressed gently, turns out to require some of philosophy’s sharpest tools.

What we don’t

News, polemic, manifesto. We are uninterested in declaring positions. We are interested in following an inquiry where it goes.