You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.

Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.

The self is not a thing, but a process.

What many people don't see is that there are abundant examples of phenomenal opacity: It is one of the most interesting features of the human conscious model of reality that, first, it can contain elements that are not experienced as mind-independent, as unequivocally real, as immediately given, and second, that there is a "gradient of realness" in which one and the same content can be experienced transparently or in an opaque fashion.

Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".

Retribution is really a stone age concept.