Oxford Scholarship Online
June 21, 2018
Elizabeth Schechter
Split-brain subjects may have two distinct subjects of experience, one per hemisphere, because consciousness is unified within each hemisphere but not across them. The empirical basis is that elements of experience are present in both hemispheres yet are not integrated between them. This suggests each hemisphere has its own subjective perspective, making it impossible for a single subject to have multiple perspectives in the same way another subject has one. Therefore, the two hemispheres likely correspond to separate subjects of experience, each related to its perspective as a normal person is to theirs.
Oxford Scholarship Online
May 30, 2018
M. Massimini, G. Tononi
A general principle for sizing up consciousness, grounded in information integration theory (IIT), is explored. The book addresses why the brain but not other organs hosts experience, why consciousness fades in deep sleep yet returns in dreams, and whether unresponsive patients, parrots, octopuses, or computers can be conscious. Theoretical principles are translated into anatomical observations and novel empirical measurements, including an index of brain complexity applicable at the bedside of brain-injured patients. The authors aim to describe a preliminary attempt to identify a general rule for assessing the capacity for consciousness within and beyond the human skull.
Oxford Scholarship Online
May 24, 2018
Christopher Partridge
During the early nineteenth century, opium held significant cultural and literary importance, particularly within the Romantic movement. This chapter examines how Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" and the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge shaped Romantic theories about dreams and induced altered states of consciousness. It also explores how Romantic writers' interest in opium's geographical and cultural origins connected to Orientalist perspectives, linking drug use to broader colonial and exoticizing attitudes toward the East.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Uriah Kriegel
A conscious perception of a tree, according to Brentano, is a single mental state that can be accurately described either as a perception of a tree or as a perception of a perception of a tree. This interpretation makes Brentano's theory more plausible than commonly thought, and even more plausible than many modern theories of consciousness.
Oxford Scholarship Online
March 22, 2018
Uriah Kriegel
This chapter establishes the groundwork for the author's broader project by examining Brentano's three fundamental modes of conscious intentionality. The distinction among these modes is presented as essential for understanding Brentano's later metaphysical and value-theoretic positions.
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 19, 2017
Evan Thompson
Cognitive neuroscience often mistakes the brain activity that accompanies mindfulness for mindfulness itself. Mindfulness, classically understood, is not merely inner observation but an integrated exercise of cognitive and bodily skills in ethically directed, situated action. From an enactive perspective, mindfulness depends on internalized social cognition and is a mode of skillful, embodied cognition that relies not only on the brain but also on the body and the physical, social, and cultural environment.
Oxford Scholarship Online
August 24, 2017
Philip Goff
A consciousness-based approach to metaphysics, analytic phenomenology, uses introspection as a key source of data for metaphysical inquiry. Building on the claim that introspection reveals the essential nature of conscious states, this methodology is applied to debates on composition and to a phenomenological argument for presentism. The author argues that the datum of consciousness is largely neglected in contemporary philosophy and that properly appreciating it could transform analytic metaphysics.
Oxford Scholarship Online
August 24, 2017
Susan A. J. Stuart
Every action and sensation is a living, non-propositional question probing how the world is and how it might become. Using the concept of enkinaesthesia, the paper examines how an agent's affectively engaged co-engagement with its world creates patterns of co-articulated meaning within anticipatory affective dynamics and experiential entanglement needed for effective action and adaptation. Extending radical embodied mind theories beyond minimalist embodiment yields a new wave of embodiment theory, suggesting an immanent intercorporeality where the living being of other agents is experienced directly, without cognitive mediation.
Oxford Scholarship Online
August 24, 2017
Philip Goff
A family of difficulties known as the combination problem challenges Russellian monism, which holds that consciousness is fundamental to reality. Panprotopsychism risks collapsing into noumenalism, the view that humans cannot understand matter's concrete nature. Panpsychism faces the subject-summing problem: how micro-level conscious subjects combine into macro-level ones. A solution to the subject-summing problem is proposed, and panpsychist forms of Russellian monism are argued to be preferable on grounds of simplicity and elegance.
Oxford Scholarship Online
August 24, 2017
Philip Goff
Cosmopsychism, a combination of panpsychism and priority monism, holds that the universe itself is a single fundamental conscious subject. This view solves the Subject Irreducibility Problem, which challenges other theories. An empirical argument against emergentism is presented; if sound, cosmopsychism becomes the only anti-emergentist position that resolves the problem. The chapter also addresses the 'incredulous stare'—the intuition that cosmopsychism is too implausible—arguing that this reaction stems from cultural biases, and that both cosmopsychism and physicalism are rooted in the same anti-emergentist motivations.
Oxford Scholarship Online
June 22, 2017
Richard Moran
The paper argues that the 'theory-theory' view—which treats ordinary psychological terms as part of a theory for explaining others' behavior—is a poor model for understanding how we ascribe mental states. It contends that the self/other asymmetries in how we apply psychological terms in first-person versus third-person contexts actually follow naturally from the core insights of the 'rationalizing interpretation' perspective associated with Davidson and Dennett. This reconciliation shows that the apparent conflict between rationalizing interpretation and simulation theory is less significant than commonly assumed.