14 papers in the library · 262 citations · publishing 2003-2026
British Journal of Aesthetics June 2, 2026 Uriah Kriegel
Abstract Seeing someone contrasts both with (a) thinking about them and with (b) seeing a portrait of them, in making the person seen seem present ‘in the flesh’. A long-standing question in the philosophy of perception is what underwrites this feeling of presence in visual experience. Yet some painters excel at creating an uncanny semblance of this feeling of presence. The core of this article...
Journal of Consciousness Studies October 1, 2025 Uriah Kriegel
This paper defends four main theses. First, at least some conscious experiences are aesthetically valuable. Second, phenomenal consciousness as a whole – as a general phenomenon – is plausibly an aesthetically valuable addition to the universe. Third, the fact that something like phenomenal consciousness exists in a world otherwise consisting in particles mindlessly buzzing in mostly empty...
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2025 Uriah Kriegel
Josh Weisberg develops a form of physicalism which attempts to (a) show why there is no ultima facie explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical world, while (b) making us see why there nonetheless is a prima facie explanatory gap. The former constitutes a solution to the problem of consciousness, the latter a proposal regarding the meta-problem of consciousness (the problem,...
British Journal of Aesthetics October 7, 2024 T. Niikawa, Uriah Kriegel
The aesthetic tradition has identified as paradigmatically sublime such objects as imposing mountains and intense storms, as well as monumental art. But the tradition also acknowledges less paradigmatic cases, including sometimes mathematical structures or abstract concepts. In this paper, we argue that there is also a case for considering phenomenal consciousness—the experiential quality of...
January 19, 2023 Uriah Kriegel 7 citations
Abstract A widespread assumption in current philosophy of mind is that a conscious state’s phenomenal properties vary with its representational contents. In this chapter, I present an alternative picture that admits two kinds of phenomenal properties that do not vary with content. First, there are phenomenal properties that vary rather with attitude. Secondly, there is a kind of phenomenal...
Cambridge University Press eBooks September 30, 2022 Anna Giustina, Uriah Kriegel
Qualitative consciousness is conscious experience marked by the presence of sensory qualities, like the experienced painfulness of having a piano dropped on your foot or the consciousness of seeing the brilliant reds and oranges of a sunset. Over his career, philosopher David Rosenthal has defended an influential theoretical approach to explaining qualitative consciousness. This approach...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness July 9, 2020 Uriah Kriegel 3 citations
The centerpiece of the scientific study of consciousness is the search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Yet science is typically interested not only in discovering correlations, but also—and more deeply—in explaining them. When faced with a correlation between two phenomena in nature, we typically want to know why they correlate. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. The...
Analysis July 1, 2019 Uriah Kriegel 62 citations
Recent work within such disparate research areas as the epistemology of perception, theories of well-being, animal and medical ethics, the philosophy of consciousness, and theories of understanding in philosophy of science and epistemology has featured disconnected discussions of what is arguably a single underlying question: What is the value of consciousness? The purpose of this paper is to...
Oxford Scholarship Online March 22, 2018 Uriah Kriegel
It is argued that for Brentano, a conscious perception of a tree is a single mental state that can be (accurately) conceived of, or framed, either as a perception of a tree or as a perception of a perception of a tree. It is further argued that this interpretation casts Brentano’s theory as quite a bit more plausible than it is commonly taken to be, indeed more plausible than many modern...
Oxford Scholarship Online March 22, 2018 Uriah Kriegel
Chap. 1 concerned Brentano’s theory of consciousness, and Chap. 2 his theory of intentionality, the mark of the conscious. This chapter lays the foundations for the rest of the book by discussing the three fundamental modes of conscious intentionality in Brentano’s theory of mind. This three-way distinction is crucial, as will later be seen, to Brentano’s metaphysics and value theory.
Advances in Consciousness Research June 17, 2015 Benjamin Kozuch, Uriah Kriegel
Why is there need for a philosophy of consciousness, in addition to the science of consciousness? For two reasons: first, as a young science operating as yet under no guiding paradigm, the science of consciousness has been subject to considerable confusion regarding its methodological, conceptual, and philosophical foundations, and it is philosophy’s mandate to address such confusion in an...
Oxford University Press eBooks August 1, 2009 Uriah Kriegel
There are two major scientific questions surrounding consciousness: the neural correlate of consciousness and the function of consciousness. This chapter derives specific hypotheses about the neural correlate and function of consciousness from the self‐representational theory of consciousness.
Philosophy Compass 2006 Uriah Kriegel
Abstract Phenomenal consciousness is the property mental states, events, and processes have when, and only when, there is something it is like for their subject to undergo them, or be in them. What it is like to have a conscious experience is customarily referred to as the experience's phenomenal character . Theories of consciousness attempt to account for this phenomenal character. This...
Canadian Journal of Philosophy March 1, 2003 Uriah Kriegel 190 citations
The word ‘consciousness’ is notoriously ambiguous. This is mainly because it isnota term of art, but a mundane word we all use quite frequently, for different purposes and in different everyday contexts. In this paper, I am going to discuss consciousness in one specific sense of the word. To avoid the ambiguities of the word ‘consciousness,’ I will introduce a term of art:intransitive...