The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Philippe Chuard
57 citations
The temporal aspects of experience raise three related questions, central to our understanding of temporal consciousness: how do sensory experiences carry information about, or make us aware of, some of the temporal features of perceived events (if at all)—in what format, by what mechanisms?; do the temporal properties of conscious experiences—including the arrangement of their temporal...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Elizabeth Irvine, Mark Sprevak
36 citations
This chapter examines a radical philosophical position about consciousness: eliminativism. Eliminativists claim that consciousness does not exist and/or that talk of consciousness should be eliminated from science. These are strong positions to take, and require serious defence. In the first section, the chapter introduces the difference between entity eliminativism and discourse eliminativism...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Angela Mendelovici, David Bourget
28 citations
Philosophers traditionally recognize two key features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the ‘aboutness’ of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or ‘what it’s like’ aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be distinct and...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Adam Pautz
23 citations
According to representationalists, sensory consciousness is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Some (Armstrong, Tye, Dretske) have suggested that representationalism fits well with the idea that consciousness can be reduced to something physical. Others think that representationalism makes the mind–body problem harder because our usual models for reducing representation do...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
David Papineau
16 citations
Consciousness raises a range of philosophical questions. We can distinguish between the How?, Where?, and What? questions. First, how does consciousness relate to other features of reality? Second, where are conscious phenomena located in reality? And, third, what is the nature of consciousness? In line with much philosophical writing over the past fifty years, this chapter will focus mostly on...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Tom McClelland
16 citations
Self-Representationalists hold that conscious mental states are conscious in virtue of suitably representing themselves, and that awareness of a mental state is achieved by representing oneself as being in that state. Where Higher-Order Representationalists claim that awareness of a mental state is conferred by a distinct mental state that represents it, Self-Representationalists instead argue...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Christopher Mole
14 citations
The English word ‘attention’ can be used loosely. As a tactic for preventing an enquiry into attention’s relationship to consciousness from lapsing into ill-definition, we shall treat ‘attention’ as a term to be defined by the role that is assigned to it in our explanations of empirically established psychological phenomena (especially those involving the modulation of reaction times). We will...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Julien Deonna, Fabrice Teroni
14 citations
This chapter explores substantive accounts of emotional phenomenology, in order to see whether it sheds light on key features of emotions. To this end, it focuses on four features that can be introduced by way of an example. Say Sam is angry at Maria’s nasty remark. The first feature relates to the fact that anger is a negative emotion, by contrast with positive emotions such as joy and...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Dan Zahavi
9 citations
Not that long ago, discussions of selfhood in philosophy of mind tended to focus on diachronic identity and the so-called persistence question. Important as this question might be, it does, however, not exhaust the topic of selfhood. In recent years, the focus has shifted somewhat from diachronic to synchronic identity and given rise to a lively debate concerning the relationship between...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Joshua Shepherd, Neil Levy
4 citations
This chapter considers three connections between consciousness and issues in ethics: first, the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status; second, the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding moral responsibility for action; and third, the relevance of consciousness for the acquisition of moral knowledge. This is a disparate set of connections,...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Philip Goff, Sam Coleman
4 citations
Russellian monism is a quite general approach to the problem of consciousness, which comes in a variety of forms depending on what is said about the categorical properties of basic physical entities. We can usefully distinguish between panpsychist and panprotopsychist forms. Panpsychist Russellian monists hold that the categorical properties of basic physical entities are experiential...
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...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Tim Bayne
2 citations
Conscious thought has been neglected, but it has not been entirely overlooked. Discussion of the topic has focused on three sets of questions. The first set of questions focuses on the kinds of states (events, episodes) that qualify as forms of conscious thought. What might a taxonomy of conscious thought look like? A second set of questions concerns the kind(s) of consciousness that...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Farid Masrour
2 citations
Philosophical interest in unity of consciousness goes back at least to Kant. A recent revival of interest among analytic philosophers of mind focuses on unity of consciousness, construed as phenomenal unity. This chapter will survey some of the issues and questions that have been central to this recent work before sketching an alternative to what may be seen as a dominant, though implicit,...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Mark Rowlands
2 citations
The question of whether consciousness is embodied has been vitiated by a failure to ask a more basic, and possibly obvious, question: what is the body? This chapter argues that the body you see in the mirror, the hands that you hold up in front of you, are instances of the body as object. But the body is more than the body as object. There is also the body as subject; the body as lived. You...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Maja Spener
2 citations
In recent years, the divide between conscious and unconscious perception has been the focus of a thriving research area in the science of consciousness. Subjective measures, frequently referred to as ‘introspective measures’, play a prominent role in this literature and have been the subject of intense criticism. This chapter discusses the main types of subjective measures used in current-day...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Brie Gertler
1 citation
Dualism is a metaphysical view about the nature of consciousness, driven largely by epistemic concerns. Dualism’s chief rival, physicalism about consciousness, is also a metaphysical view driven largely by epistemic concerns. A primary goal of this chapter is to correct a widespread misunderstanding about how epistemic issues shape the debate between dualists and physicalists. According to a...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Benjamin Kozuch
1 citation
In its classical form, epiphenomenalism is the view that conscious mental events have no physical effects: while physical events cause mental events, the opposite is never true. Unlike classical epiphenomenalism, contemporary forms do not hold that conscious mental states always lack causal efficacy, only that they are epiphenomenal relative to certain kinds of action, ones we pre-theoretically...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Christopher S. Hill
This chapter is concerned with relationships between three forms of consciousness and three types of memory. The three forms of consciousness are introspective consciousnessaccess consciousnessand phenomenal consciousness.There are three types of memory that are arguably connected, either directly or indirectly, with one or more of the aforementioned forms of consciousness—long-term memory,...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Casey O'Callaghan
This chapter addresses perceptual consciousness beyond vision. An impressive reach of human perceptual consciousness is non-visual. From this perspective, it is odd that philosophers have so persistently focused on visual forms at the expense of others. This oversight has potential costs. Nothing guarantees that claims about perceptual consciousness or its phenomenology founded on vision alone...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Michael Pelczar
Metaphysical idealism is the mirror-image of physicalism about the mental: where physicalists contend that the mental facts of our world supervene on the physical facts (but not vice versa), idealists contend that the physical facts of our world supervene on the mental facts (but not vice versa). Like physicalism, idealism is a kind of monism. According to idealists, the fundamental features of...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Berit "brit" Brogaard, Elijah Chudnoff
This chapter focuses on the relationship between consciousness and knowledge, and in particular on the role perceptual consciousness might play in justifying beliefs about the external world. A version of phenomenal dogmatism is outlined according to which perceptual experiences immediately, prima facie justify certain select parts of their content, and do so in virtue of their having a...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Daniel Stoljar
According to the epistemic view of the hard problem of consciousness, we are ignorant at least for the time being of something important and relevant when it comes to the hard problem, and this fact has a significant implication for its solution. This chapter outlines one version of the view before considering two objections. The first is that, while we may be ignorant of various features of...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Josh Weisberg
Higher-order (HO) theories of consciousness hold that a mental state is conscious when it is appropriately represented by a ‘higher-order’ state, a state about another mental state. The higher-order perception (HOP) theory holds that HO representation is best modeled on perceptual processes, while the higher-order thought (HOT) theory holds that it is best modeled on thought. In addition, some...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Myrto I. Mylopoulos, Joshua Shepherd
This chapter reflects on questions about the nature and sources of agentive phenomenology—that is, the set of those experience-types associated with exercises of agency, and paradigmatically with intentional actions. The discussion begins with pioneering work in psychology and neuroscience that dates to the early 1980s. Much of the current work on agentive phenomenology in both psychology and...