There are more than two fundamental kinds of consciousness. While many philosophers hold that only sensory and algedonic (pleasure-pain) phenomenology exist, Franz Brentano and Alexander Pfänder each proposed three basic mental kinds. Brentano's classification includes mere presentations, judgments, and "phenomena of love and hate"; Pfänder's includes object-consciousness, feeling, and striving. Pfänder's view, supplemented by Husserlian ideas, is preferable because Brentano's separation of doxastically neutral presentations from positing judgments is problematic, and his unification of feelings, emotions, desires, and volitions into one class is too broad. The deeper disagreement stems from different views on the "mark of the mental" and the active/passive distinction.
In the philosophy of perception, a central debate is whether perceptual experience has representational content—whether it always presents the world as being a certain way, evaluable for truth or accuracy. Representationalists affirm this, while relationalists challenge it with the generality problem of perception (GPP). This paper analyzes existing replies to the GPP and concludes that representationalists have not yet offered a convincing answer, and after nearly 20 years, the problem remains unresolved.
P. F. Strawson argued that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. This essay evaluates that claim, explicating Strawson's thesis and reconstructing his argument, then identifying where it fails. The author uses Kant's remarks on the passivity of experience to propose an alternative: in self-ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects, providing a different route from unity to objectivity.