Australasian Journal of Philosophy
January 4, 2026
Joshua Shepherd, Tim Bayne
1 citation
A foundational issue for the science and philosophy of consciousness concerns the function(s) of consciousness—what consciousness does for any particular aspect of psychological or neural processing. In spite of progress in consciousness science, false assumptions and a lack of clarity regarding how best to approach the functions of consciousness represent an ongoing and serious roadblock to...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
December 11, 2024
Raphaël Millière
ABSTRACT The claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness has a long philosophical history, and has received renewed support in recent years. My aim in this paper is to argue that this surprisingly enduring idea is misleading at best, and insufficiently supported at worst. I start by offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
May 8, 2024
Joseph Gottlieb, B. Fischer
ABSTRACT The history of philosophy is a history of moral circle expansion. This history correlates with a history of expansionism about consciousness. Recently, expansionism about consciousness has exploded: to invertebrates, to plants, to logic gates, and to fundamental entities. The last of these expansions stems from a surge of interest in panpsychism. In an exploratory spirit, this paper...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
August 16, 2023
Justin Mendelow
5 citations
Russellian monists argue that non-structural properties, or a combination of structural and non-structural properties, necessitate phenomenal properties. Different Russellian monists offer varying accounts of the structural/non-structural distinction, leading to divergent forms of Russellian monism. In this paper, I criticise Derk Pereboom’s characterisation of the structural/non-structural...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
July 23, 2023
Allison Aitken
1 citation
There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers beginning with Śrīgupta (seventh–eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
May 18, 2021
Donnchadh O’Conaill
ABSTRACT Einar Bohn [AJP 2019] has proposed a version of panpsychism on which consciousness is fundamentally a property of pluralities of basic objects. I argue that this pluralized panpsychism is structurally similar to emergentism, and faces the problem of explaining how a plurality of basic objects could be a subject of experiences. Because of these issues, pluralized panpsychism is not a...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
February 2, 2021
Joseph Gottlieb
18 citations
ABSTRACT I begin by developing a challenge for the Higher-Order Thought variant of Higher-Order representational theories of consciousness. The challenge is to account for the distinctive phenomenal character of visual experience—its presentational character. After setting out the challenge, I articulate a novel form of Higher-Order theory that can account for presentational character—the Map...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
October 25, 2020
Umrao Sethi
7 citations
ABSTRACT On the traditional picture, accidents must inhere in substances in order to exist. Berkeley famously argues that a particular class of accidents—the sensible qualities—are mere ideas—entities that depend for their existence on minds. To defend this view, Berkeley provides us with an elegant alternative to the traditional framework: sensible qualities depend on a mind, not in virtue of...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
August 21, 2020
Philip Woodward
ABSTRACT Constitutive panpsychism is the doctrine that macro-level consciousness—that is, consciousness of the sort possessed by certain composite things such as humans—is built out of irreducibly mental (or proto-mental) features had by some or all of the basic physical constituents of reality. On constitutive panpsychism, changes in macro-level consciousness amount to changes in either the...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
July 16, 2018
Einar Duenger Bøhn
11 citations
Panpsychism claims that each fundamental entity is conscious, but then faces the problem of how such entities combine to make up our ordinary consciousness. In this paper, I show how panpsychism can avoid this so-called combination problem by taking seriously plural collective properties at the fundamental level.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
April 18, 2018
Evan Westra
1 citation
"Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content, by Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin." Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 97(1), p. 210
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
March 30, 2011
Briggs Wright
7 citations
In the philosophy of perception, typically, everything is illuminated. Discussions of perceptual experience primarily focus on subjects situated in illuminated environs. Rarely do we see treatment of putative perceptual experience involving darkness. In this paper, I will carefully canvas and characterize the nature of experiences of darkness, marking a substantive distinction between two such...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
March 17, 2011
René Jagnow
2 citations
According to the monitoring theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious in virtue of being represented in the right way by a monitoring state. David Rosenthal, William Lycan, and Uriah Kriegel have developed three different influential versions of this theory. In order to explain colour experiences, each of these authors combines his version of the monitoring theory of consciousness...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
June 9, 2010
Bernard Molyneux
8 citations
I show that the recursive structure of Leibniz's Law requires agents to perform infinitely many operations to psychologically identify the referents of phenomenal and physical concepts, even though the referents of ordinary concepts (e.g. Hesperus and Phosphorus) can be identified in a finite number of steps. The resulting problem resembles the hard problem of consciousness in the fact that it...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
November 21, 2008
Robert J. Howell
87 citations
A purely metaphysical formulation of physicalism is surprisingly elusive. One popular slogan is, ‘There is nothing over and above the physical’. Problems with this arise on two fronts. First, it is difficult to explain what makes a property ‘physical’ without appealing to the methodology of physics or to particular ways in which properties are known. This obviously introduces epistemic features...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
September 1, 1998
Gerard J. O’brien, Jon Opie
33 citations
It is commonplace for both philosophers and cognitive scientists to express their allegiance to the “unity of consciousness”. This is the claim that a subject’s phenomenal consciousness, at any one moment in time, is a single thing. This view has had a major influence on computational theories of consciousness. In particular, what we call single-track theories dominate the literature, theories...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
March 1, 1995
David Lewis
178 citations
(1995). Should a materialist believe in Qualia? Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 140-144.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
June 1, 1988
Ullin T. Place
44 citations
(1988). Thirty years on — Is consciousness still a brain process? Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 208-219.