Arnaud Dewalque

Call Experientialism the view that experience is constitutive of mentality. This view was once prominent in the Cambridge School of analysis. Drawing on considerations offered by Cambridge philosophers, this chapter features three independent arguments for experientialism, to wit: the implication argument, the dependence argument, and the argument from non-objectual awareness. All three arguments, it is suggested, lead to experientialism from a different route: the first rests on logical, the second on metaphysical, and the third on phenomenological considerations. This paper offers a reconstruction and critical assessment of each of them.

Husserl famously argued that Brentano’s descriptive psychology, unlike his own ‘pure’ phenomenology, deals with real mental states of empirical persons. In this paper, I challenge this interpretation. I argue that descriptive psychology does not yield empirical propositions on the mental life of real persons but description-based conceptual truths. This can be shown by highlighting the centrality of conceptual analysis in Brentano’s descriptive psychology. Very roughly, the method of the latter consists in noticing aspects of one’s own mental life in order to acquire the related concept, or concepts. Yet, once this is done, the next step is to derive from there conceptual truths about mental acts—truths which are arrived at by means of conceptual insight. I then distinguish four varieties of conceptual analysis—namely: decomposition, quasi-analysis, paraphrase and conceptual mapping—and argue that propositions yielded by descriptive psychology cover all four of them.

Let 'outer awareness' (OA) be the awareness of something extramental, 'inner awareness' (IA) the awareness of one’s own occurent mental states, and 'self-awareness' (SA) the awareness of oneself as a subject of experience. Besides, let us call 'Ubiquity Thesis' the claim that IA and SA are ubiquitous, indeed are always concomitant with OA even in the case of an absent-minded experience. The goal of this paper is to vindicate the Ubiquity Thesis: the key idea is that, before any act of reflection or introspection, IA and SA are implicit in OA, in a sense to be explained. What emerges is a picture of SA (and IA) which departs from some current theories and, especially, from self-representational accounts of SA and IA.

Call experientialism about mentality the view that being in a mental state amounts to having an experience, while having a mind amounts to being capable of having experiences. In short, experience is a mark of the mental. Although experientialism has largely fallen out of favor, it was once the predominant view in the Cambridge School of analysis, explicitly endorsed by G.F. Stout, G.E. Moore and the early Russell, among others. Drawing on their views, I briefly discuss three challenges to experientialism and argue that they can all be successfully addressed. My conclusion is that experientialism is a respectable view of mentality.

Call Experientialism the view that experience is constitutive of mentality. This view was once prominent in the Cambridge School of analysis. Drawing on considerations offered by Cambridge philosophers, this chapter features three independent arguments for experientialism, to wit: the implication argument, the dependence argument, and the argument from non-objectual awareness. All three arguments, it is suggested, lead to experientialism from a different route: the first rests on logical, the second on metaphysical, and the third on phenomenological considerations. This paper offers a reconstruction and critical assessment of each of them.

This paper addresses Lotze’s influence on James Ward’s panpsychism and offers a brief assessment of their views. Both Lotze and Ward endorse a strong version of panpsychism, namely pure mentalism, according to which the constituents of reality deceptively appear to be material while in fact they are purely mental. Section 1 presents Ward’s own version of pure mentalism as an attempt to improve on Lotze’s. Section 2 argues that this attempt fails and raises some difficulties for pure mentalism in general. Section 3 sketches an alternative metaphysical view, on which mind and matter are both essentially distinct and essentially inseparable.

Brentano famously defined psychology as the study of mental phenomena. But what are mental phenomena? In this paper I argue that mental phenomena are mental ‘appearances', where an ‘appearance' is neither a mere semblance nor some object that appears. Instead, just as physical appearances are ways things appear to me (something that is routinely captured in perceptual reports such as 'this cup appears *red* to me'), mental appearances are ways I appear to myself, for example as *perceiving a red cup* or *desiring an espresso*. I provide textual evidence for this interpretation before exploring some of its implications for a correct understanding of Brentano’s descriptive psychology and intentionality thesis. It follows, among other things, that intentionality is neither a relation nor a monadic property of mental states but rather a specification of the way mentally active subjects appear to themselves.

Value Realists are committed to the view that value statements such as ‘A is intrinsically good’ are (a) truth-assessable propositions and (b) true only if A actually instantiates the intrinsic property of goodness. My paper contrasts two critical reactions toward value realism, namely: that of emotivists such as Carnap, who argue that value statements are *pseudo-propositions* and reject (a), and that of Brentano and the Brentanians, who accept (a) but argue that value predicates are *pseudo-predicates* and reject (b).

G.F. Stout argues that secondary qualities—color, sound, taste, odor, heat, cold, and the likes—are physically real: “There is no reason,” he writes, “why the physical world, should not be pervaded through and through by secondary qualities” (Stout 1931, 281). I reconstruct his argument for this thesis and argue that it rests on a distinctively Brentanian premise, namely the claim that our sensory experiences, however basic, typically exhibit some internal complexity (the so-called act-content-object structure). I explicate how this claim is employed to support the physical reality of secondary qualities, and how it puts Stout in a position to reconcile common sense and science by accommodating two sets of apparently conflicting data in his theory.