ISSN 1324-5155
7 papers in the library · 345 citations · publishing 2009-2019
Analysis July 1, 2019 Uriah Kriegel 62 citations
Recent work within such disparate research areas as the epistemology of perception, theories of well-being, animal and medical ethics, the philosophy of consciousness, and theories of understanding in philosophy of science and epistemology has featured disconnected discussions of what is arguably a single underlying question: What is the value of consciousness? The purpose of this paper is to...
Analysis June 20, 2011 John Cottingham
We are all familiar with the alleged ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – explaining how the subjective world of conscious awareness could arise out of neuronal activity. Owen Flanagan, an out-and-out naturalist, is committed to dissolving this much discussed problem without any appeal to ‘spooky’ immaterial entities or properties. Instead, he proposes that the solution depends on accepting what...
Analysis May 16, 2011 David Rosenthal 152 citations
The report of my death is an exaggeration. (Mark Twain, New York Journal, 2 June 1897) A state’s being conscious is a matter of mental appearance – of how one’s mental life appears to one. If somebody is in a mental state but doesn’t seem subjectively to be in that state, the state is not conscious. This straightforward test for the consciousness of mental states is deeply entrenched in common...
Analysis May 16, 2011 Josh Weisberg 77 citations
Ned Block argues that the higher order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (Block 2011: 427).1 In this response, I wish...
Analysis July 30, 2010 John Preston
Robert Rupert’s book is a thorough examination of a family of views of cognition that have emerged from recent work in what is sometimes called ‘situated’ cognitive science, that is, the kind of cognitive science that tries to take seriously the thought that human cognition is an achievement of creatures with a certain kind of body, which exist in relationships to their physical environment....
Analysis December 16, 2009 David Rosenthal 27 citations
One thing a theory of consciousness must do is capture the way conscious states differ from mental states that are not conscious. If an individual is in some mental state but wholly unaware of being in that state, that state is not a conscious state. By contraposition, a necessary condition for a state’s being conscious is that one is in some way aware of it. We can describe being conscious or...
Analysis July 8, 2009 C. Liang, Timothy Lane 27 citations
Somatoparaphrenia, a pathology of self, is philosophically perplexing. It poses a significant challenge for theories of consciousness, including David Rosenthal's higher-order thought (HOT) theory, which holds that HOTs are scientific posits in a theory that aims for explanatory adequacy. In a recent series of papers Rosenthal (e.g. 2005: 341) has employed the HOT theory as part of an attempt...