There is a debate about the “pure ego” that begins with Paul Natorp and Edmund Husserl and their methodological differences arising largely from the heritage of their predecessors. This article intends to show how the construction of this initial debate provides support for the development of a second one within the phenomenological tradition itself, in which Aron Gurwitsch questions the "pure...
This article aims at giving a brief comment on Denis Fisette’s interpretation of Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness by Franz Brentano, where consciousness has been seen as a form of intransitive self-consciousness being intrinsic to the agent. In agreement with that interpretation, I want to present a few more basic arguments in order to support that assumption such as, for example, some...
This article addresses the recent reception of Franz Brentano’s writings on consciousness. I am particularly interested in the connection established between Brentano’s theory of consciousness and higher-order theories of consciousness and, more specifically, the theory proposed by David Rosenthal. My working hypothesis is that despite the many similarities that can be established with...
For the last few years, research on Brentano’s psychology has turned to mereology for a theoretical framework which could help to address and solve some major problems, such as the question of the unity of the mind despite its being made up of lots of simultaneous and consecutive mental acts or the question of the unity of each of these mental acts despite of its being made up of several...
In this paper, I discuss Fisette’s Interpretation of Brentano’s philosophy of mind in the framework of the modern higher-order theories, especially Rosenthal’s version. While acknowledging the truth of Fisette’s rendering of Brentano’s psychology as a first-order theory, I examine at length the theses that all mental states are conscious states, or can became conscious states, and that the...