Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1995
Thomas Natsoulas
The present series concerning the stream of consciousness continues with two articles that examine James's conception of “ejective” consciousness in The Principles. During certain altered states, and perhaps at other times as well, mental-occurrence instances take place that are not part of the individual's original stream of consciousness. Usually, if not always, such “split-off”...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1994
Thomas Natsoulas
8 citations
Quite naturally, Imagination, Cognition and Personality is the literal context of the present series of articles, which aims to examine what is known and knowledgeably held about the nature and character of the referents of William James's concept of the stream of consciousness. The sixth and seventh installments focus on selected relevant interpretations and facts from Imagination, Cognition...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1994
Thomas Natsoulas
9 citations
Quite naturally, Imagination, Cognition and Personality is the literal context of the present series of articles, which aims to examine what is known and knowledgeably held about the nature and character of the referents of William James's concept of the stream of consciousness. The sixth and seventh installments focus on selected relevant interpretations and facts from Imagination, Cognition...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1994
Thomas Natsoulas
17 citations
This is the fifth in a series of articles that compile and critically spell out what is known or knowledgeably held about the stream of consciousness. Discussed here are two aspects of James's conception: 1) the kind of mental-occurrence instance that is the stream's basic durational component, and 2) the change in James's explicit account of the temporal structure of the stream, from The...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1994
Thomas Natsoulas
11 citations
I devote most of the present article, which is the fourth in a series concerning the nature and characteristics of William James's stream of consciousness, to an examination of Adolf Grünbaum's case for the stream's atomicity. For this purpose, I use the lens provided by the objection that auditory perceptual experience of a continuous sound of unchanging pitch does not exhibit a discrete,...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1993
Thomas Natsoulas
Implicitly and later explicitly, James understood the stream of consciousness to consist of a sequence of temporally adjacent pulses of consciousness (except for time gaps when consciousness stops). Gibson claimed James's stream amounts to a stream of self-consciousness since it includes “a travelling moment of present time.” Reference to the present, according to Gibson, depends on the...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1993
Thomas Natsoulas
In this second article of a series that examines from various perspectives the phenomenon that James called “the stream of consciousness,” I continue to argue that James's implicit account of the stream was not consistent with how he advertised it in The Principles. James's stream was more analogous to a train, with tightly adjacent successive components, than to a stream of water. Additional...
Philosophical Psychology
1993
Thomas Natsoulas
70 citations
The present article distinguishes three kinds of accounts of direct (reflective) awareness (i.e. awareness of one's mental occurrences causally unmediated by any other mental occurrence): mental‐eye theory, self‐intimational theory and appendage theory. These aim to explain the same phenomenon, though each proposes that direct (reflective) awareness occurs in a fundamentally different way....
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1992
Thomas Natsoulas
It is argued here that William James's famous stream of consciousness, as he addressed it in The Principles of Psychology, is not after all analogous to a stream or river of water, but rather it consists of a succession of discrete instances or states of consciousness. Already in 1890, James had implicitly arrived at his later explicit conception of consciousness as made up of individual...
Imagination Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1992
Thomas Natsoulas
3 citations
Based on D. W. Smith's recent phenomenological account of consciousness, this article seeks to improve our understanding of the unique relation of special ownership (R) that exists between every mental-occurrence instance and its subject, trie one who “has” or “lives” the mental-occurrence instance. The subject is assumed to be a person or animal, although mentioned in passing are cerebral...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1987
Thomas Natsoulas
The present article utilizes the six basic concepts of consciousness for the purpose of clarifying the nature and characteristics of William James's stream of awareness. Simultaneously, an effort is made to render these concepts more understandable as referring to different properties and kinds of properties of a single basic phenomenon. Thus, a second purpose of this article is implicitly to...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1984
Thomas Natsoulas
Everyone agrees on one thing about consciousness—it possesses some sort of unity. Theorists of consciousness do not always give the same account of what this property amounts to, or of that from which they believe unity derives. In the present article, the unity of consciousness is discussed with reference to authors who have given to it some, larger or smaller, quantity of theoretical...