David Rosenthal

Mind-body materialism is at its most inviting in the context of trying to give a unified treatment of the natural world. And the principle challenge it faces is to do justice to the distinguishing features of mental phenomena, which set them off from nonmental, physical reality. This challenge it not easy to meet. In 1971 I suggested that the difficulty in meeting it makes especially appealing the eliminative materialism of Feyerabend and Rorty. If adopting the materialist view that mental phenomena are physical in nature prevents us from giving a satisfactory account of what is distinctive about the mental, perhaps the trouble is not with materialism but with the mental. If we can describe and explain everything about the world in physical terms but cannot give a satisfactory account of the distinctively mental, why not conclude that there simply are no mental states and events? Physical terms would then suffice to describe and explain the phenomena we now classify as mental. Even if describing and explaining these things physically is not a practical option, the possibility of doing so would underwrite the eliminative materialist position

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 access consciousness, as Block draws it, is untenable. Though mental states that have qualitative character plainly differ from those with no mental qualities, a mental stateÕs being conscious is the same property for both kinds of mental state. For one thing, as Block describes access consciousness, that notion does not pick out any property that we intuitively count as a mental stateÕs being conscious. But the deeper problem is that BlockÕs notion of phenomenal consciousness, or phenomenality, is ambiguous as between two very different mental properties. The failure to distinguish these results in the begging of important theoretical questions. Once the two kinds of phenomenality have been distinguished, the way is clear to explain qualitative consciousness by appeal to a model such as the higher-order-thought hypothesis. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science . All rights reserved

Strawson’s challenging and provocative defence of panpsychism1 begins by sensibly insisting that physicalism, properly understood, must unflinchingly countenance the occurrence of conscious experiences. No view, he urges, will count as ‘real physicalism’ (p. 4) if it seeks to get around or soften that commitment, as versions of socalled physicalism sometimes do. Real physicalism (hereinafter physicalism tout court) must accordingly reject any stark opposition of mental and physical, which is not only invoked by many followers of Descartes, but even countenanced by many recent physicalists. Conscious experiences, Strawson persuasively urges, are a special case of the physical, just as cows are animals. Panpsychism enters the picture because, despite the physical nature of conscious experiences, Strawson maintains that we cannot describe or explain the experiential using the terms of physics or neurophysiology. Since the experiential is nonetheless physical, Strawson concludes that the physical ultimates must, in addition to whatever properties physics and neurophysiology reveal, have experiential properties as well. Strawson argues that we cannot avoid this conclusion by maintaining that combinations of physical ultimates constitute or give rise to experiential properties. Physical ultimates cannot give rise to conscious experience unless those ultimates are themselves in some way ‘intrinsically experiential’ (p. 22). The experiential cannot emerge from nonexperiential ultimates in the way that macroscopic liquidity is standardly held to emerge from molecular properties. Strawson concludes that at least some physical ultimates must be ‘intrinsically experience-involving’ (p. 22); and, since it’s reasonable to see the physical ultimates as homogeneous in nature, we should assume that they all have experiential properties

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. Though much in the book is devoted to an account of the mind, that focus results from the broader goal of finding a methodology for discovery that will deliver an overall picture of reality consonant with a mathematical physics. Much that Descartes says in this book may strike many readers as extravagant and implausible, and perhaps hardly worth serious consideration. But there is a line of argument one can extract that is challenging and often compelling, even if not in the end wholly convincin ..

In these comments on Bernard Williams's probing and provocative paper, I shall first try to develop a line of response to the pair of problems Williams poses concerning Aristotle's account of soul. I shall then offer some reactions, of a more general sort, to his discussion of hylomorphism (henceforth "HMism"). In particular, I want to suggest that, though HMism is in part a form of inoffensive materialism, it is more than just that. And I want to urge also that HMism need not be tempted towards the quasi-dualist position that Williams describes.

There is much in Bridgeman's account that I find congenial and compelling, especially appealing is Bridgeman's application of his thesis to the tie between consciousness and language. Nonetheless, I want to raise some questions about whether the tie he finds between plans and consciousness actually does hold. Not all memory and attention is conscious. Although attention and accessing of memories are required to execute plans, we need not be at all conscious of the relevant states of memory and attention. Nor need we be conscious of the objects that those acts of attention and accessed memories are about. We need not necessarily appeal to the executing of plans to explain the important tie between language and consciousness.

Contemporary discussions typically give somewhat sort shrift to the theory of judgment Descartes advances in the Fourth Meditation.' One reason for this relative neglect is presumably the prima facie implausibility of the theory. It sounds odd to say that, in believing something, one's mental affirmation is an act of free will, on a par with freely deciding what to do. In addition, Descartes advances the theory as a way to explain the possibility of human error, which doubtless strikes many as a rather esoteric undertaking. The need to explain error, moreover, arises because of the divine guarantee, and epistemic theodicy is a project unlikely to interest most contemporary readers. And because the theory of judgment postulates two mental..

Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought (HOT) that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with and helps sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications.

red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round phys- ical object. Still, we use the words 'red' and 'round' to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual experience of a red disk, or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than we hallucinate, we apply terms for color and shape to physical objects far more often than to visual experiences. Moreover, different theories of perception explain in different ways the applications such terms have to physical objects and to visual experiences. But whatever their frequency and explanation, it seems clear that both sorts of application occur

Theories of what it is for a mental state to be conscious must answer two questions. We must say how we're conscious of our conscious mental states. And we must explain why we seem to be conscious of them in a way that's immediate. Thomas Natsoulas distinguishes three strategies for explaining what it is for mental states to be conscious. I show that the differences among those strategies are due to the divergent answers they give to the foregoing questions. Natsoulas finds most promising the strategy that amounts to the higher-order-thought hypothesis that I've defended elsewhere. But he raises a difficulty for it, which he thinks probably can be met only by modifying that strategy. I argue that this is unnecessary. The difficulty is a special case of a general question, the answer to which is independent of any issues about consciousness. So it's no part of a theory of consciousness to address the problem, much less solve it. Moreover, the difficulty seems to have intuitive force only given the picture that underlies the other two explanatory strategies, which both Natsoulas and I reject