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...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...