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441How many kinds of consciousness?Consciousness and Cognition 11 (4): 653-665. 2002.Ned BlockÕs influential distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has become a staple of current discussions of consciousness. It is not often noted, however, that his distinction tacitly embodies unargued theoretical assumptions that favor some theoretical treatments at the expense of others. This is equally so for his less widely discussed distinction between phenomenal consciousness and what he calls reflexive consciousness. I argue that the distinction between phenomenal and acce…Read more
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155(not intended for publication), Replies to Strawson and Block in Colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center, December 13, 2006.
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198The main goal of Deborah Modrak's penetrating and compelling discussion is to show that Aristotle subscribed "to an integrated model of perceptual and noetic functions" (268). Using Aristotle's phrase (Γ4, 429b13, 21), Modrak describes the integrated model as the view that "the noetic faculty is the perceptual faculty differently disposed" (283). She notes that this interpretation faces certain difficulties, but argues forcefully and incisively that it can nonetheless be sustained.
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119Explaining ConsciousnessIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 109-131. 2002.
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1Persons, minds, and consciousnessIn R. E. Auxier & L. E. Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. pp. 199-220. 2002.
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513One phenomenon pertains roughly to being awake. A person or other creature is conscious when it's awake and mentally responsive to sensory input; otherwise it's unconscious. This kind of consciousness figures most often in everyday discourse.
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3Thinking that one thinksIn Martin Davies & Glyn W. Humphreys (eds.), Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays, Blackwell. 1993.
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48Content, interpretation, and consciousnessProtoSociology 14 67-84. 2000.According to Dennett, the facts about consciousness are wholly fixed by the effects consciousness has on other things. But if a mental state's being conscious consists in one's having a higher-order thought about that state, we will in principle have an independent way to fix those facts. Dennett also holds that our speech acts sometimes determine what our thoughts are, since speech acts often outrun in content the thoughts they express.I argue that what thoughts we have is independent of how we…Read more
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6The identity theoryIn Samuel D. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 1994.In Descartes's time the issue between materialists and their opponents was framed in terms of substances. Materialists such as Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi maintained that people are physical systems with abilities that no other physical systems have; people, therefore, are special kinds of physical substance. Descartes's DUALISM, by contrast, claimed that people consist of two distinct substances that interact causally: a physical body and a nonphysical, unextended substance. The tradition…Read more
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1Consciousness and metacognitionIn Dan Sperber (ed.), Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Oxford University Press. 1998.
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IntrospectionIn Robert A. Wilson & Frank F. Keil (eds.), Mit Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Mitecs), Mit Press. 1998.
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43Subjective Character and Reflexive ContentPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1): 191-198. 2004.John Perry’s splendid book, Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness, sets out to dispel the three main objections currently lodged against mind-body materialism. These are the objection from the alleged possibility of zombies, the knowledge argument made famous by Frank Jackson, and the modal objections due principally to Saul A. Kripke and David Chalmers. The discussion is penetrating throughout, and it develops many points in illuminating detail.
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17Being Conscious of OurselvesThe Monist 87 (2): 159-181. 2004.What is it that we are conscious of when we are conscious of ourselves? Hume famously despaired of finding self, as against simply finding various impressions and ideas, when, as he put it, “I enter most intimately into what I call myself.” “When I turn my reflexion on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions.”
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99René Descartes’s Meditations on First PhilosophyTopoi 34 (2): 541-548. 2015.The major goal of René Descartes’s rich and penetrating recent book, Meditations on First Philosophy, is to develop a methodology for the discovery of the truth, more specifically, a methodology that accommodates the dictates of a mathematical physics for our view of physical reality. Such a methodology must accordingly deal with and seek to defuse the apparent conflict between a mathematical physics and our commonsense picture of things, a conflict that continues to pose difficult challenges. T…Read more
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129Few contemporary researchers in psychology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences have any doubt about whether mental phenomena occur without being conscious. There is extensive and convincing clinical and experimental evidence for the existence of thoughts, desires, and related mental states that aren’t conscious. We characterize thoughts, desires, intentions, expectations, hopes, and many other mental states in terms of the things they are about and, more fully, in terms of their content, as …Read more
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4DualismIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. 1998.Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes, and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a nonphysical object that is that human being's mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which cont…Read more
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53Perception: A Representative Theory by Frank Jackson (review)Journal of Philosophy 82 (1): 28-41. 1985.
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14Methodological behaviorism: a case for transparent texonomyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 92-93. 1980.
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139book MS in progress (title tentative)
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438Consciousness and higher-order thoughtIn L. Nagel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Macmillan. 2002.The problem of consciousness is to say what it is for some of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations to be conscious, given that others are not. This is different from saying what it is for a person to be conscious or not conscious. Even when people are conscious, many of their thoughts and sensations typically are not. And there's nothing problematic about a person's being conscious; it's just the person's being awake and responsive to sensory input
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CUNY Graduate CenterDepartment of Philosophy
Cognitive Science
Linguistics
Cognitive NeuroscienceProfessor
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Cognitive Sciences |