•  751
    The Intentional Structure of Moods
    Philosophers' Imprint 19 1-19. 2019.
    Moods are sometimes claimed to constitute an exception to the rule that mental phenomena are intentional (in the sense of representing something). In reaction, some philosophers have argued that moods are in fact intentional, but exhibit a special and unusual kind of intentionality: they represent the world as a whole, or everything indiscriminately, rather than some more specific object(s). In this paper, I present a problem for extant versions of this idea, then propose a revision that solves …Read more
  •  1301
    Précis of Brentano's Philosophical System
    European Journal of Philosophy 31 (2): 455-457. 2021.
    Here is a rather difficult two-part question: How may we grasp (a) the nature of reality and (b) the nature of value? As I understand the man, answering this question was the principal, overarching aim of Franz Brentano’s philosophical work. More specifically, he wanted to provide an answer that respected a self-imposed theoretical constraint, namely, that our grasp of a thing’s status as real or as valuable be ultimately grounded in direct encounter with certain aspects of our conscious experie…Read more
  •  5876
    The Value of Consciousness
    Analysis 79 (3): 503-520. 2019.
    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 review some of this work and place it within a unified theoretical framework that makes contributions (a…Read more
  •  1568
    What is ontology? A dialogue
    Think 18 (53): 49-65. 2019.
    This dialogue presents a substantive account of the nature and aim of ontology.Export citation.
  •  2669
    Moral phenomenology is the dedicated study of the experiential dimension of our moral inner life – of the phenomenal character of moral mental states. Many different questions arise within moral phenomenology, but three stand out. The first concerns the scope of moral experience: How much of our moral mental life is experienced by us? The second concerns the nature of moral experience: What is it like to undergo the various kinds of moral experience we have? The third concerns the theoretical ​s…Read more
  •  2618
    One of Brian Loar’s most central contributions to contemporary philosophy of mind is the notion of phenomenal intentionality: a kind of intentional directedness fully grounded in phenomenal character. Proponents of phenomenal intentionality typically also endorse the idea of cognitive phenomenology: a sui generis phenomenal character of cognitive states such as thoughts and judgments that grounds these states’ intentional directedness. This combination creates a challenge, though: namely, how to…Read more
  •  302
    Key Terms: Phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, qualitative character, subjective character, intransitive self-consciousness, disposition, categorical basis, subliminal perception, blindsight
  •  4
    Philosophical theories of consciousness: Contemporary western perspectives
    In A. Lutz, J. D. Dunne & R. J. Davidson (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press. pp. 35--66. 2006.
    This chapter surveys current approaches to consciousness in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It focuses on five approaches, to which I will refer as mysterianism, dualism, representationalism, higher-order monitoring theory, and self-representationalism. With each approach, I will present in order the leading account of consciousness along its line, the case for the approach, and the case against the approach. I will not issue a final verdict on any approach, though by the end of the chapter …Read more
  •  800
    Theories of consciousness
    Philosophy Compass 1 (1): 58-64. 2006.
    Phenomenal consciousness is the property mental states, events, and processes have when, and only when, there is something it is like for their subject to undergo them, or be in them. What it is like to have a conscious experience is customarily referred to as the experience’s phenomenal character. Theories of consciousness attempt to account for this phenomenal character. This article surveys the currently prominent theories, paying special attention to the various attempts to explain a state’s…Read more
  •  2574
    Traditional accounts of the perception/cognition divide tend to draw it in terms of subpersonal psychological processes, processes into which the subject has no first-person insight. Whatever betides such accounts, there seems to also be some first-personally accessible difference between perception and thought. At least in normal circumstances, naïve subjects can typically tell apart their perceptual states from their cognitive or intellectual ones. What are such subjects picking up on when the…Read more
  •  195
    Uriah Kriegel presents a rich exploration of the philosophy of the great nineteenth-century thinker Franz Brentano. He locates Brentano at the crossroads where the Anglo-American and continental European philosophical traditions diverged. At the centre of this account of Brentano's philosophy is the connection between mind and reality. Kriegel aims to develop Brentano's central ideas where they are overly programmatic or do not take into account philosophical developments that have taken place s…Read more
  •  5452
    One of the newest research areas in moral philosophy is moral phenomenology: the dedicated study of the experiential dimension of moral mental life. The idea has been to bring phenomenological evidence to bear on some central issues in metaethics and moral psychology, such as cognitivism and noncognitivism about moral judgment, motivational internalism and externalism, and so on. However, moral phenomenology faces certain foundational challenges, pertaining especially to the existence, describab…Read more
  •  1862
    Contemporary theories of consciousness can be divided along several major fault lines, but one of the most prominent concerns the question of whether they accept the principle that a mental state's being conscious involves essentially its subject being aware of it. Call this the awareness principle: For any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious only if S is aware of M. Although analytic philosophers divide sharply on whether to accept the principle, the philosophy-of-mind literature appe…Read more
  •  557
    The dispensability of (merely) intentional objects
    Philosophical Studies 141 (1): 79-95. 2008.
    The ontology of (merely) intentional objects is a can of worms. If we can avoid ontological commitment to such entities, we should. In this paper, I offer a strategy for accomplishing that. This is to reject the traditional act-object account of intentionality in favor of an adverbial account. According to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of bearing the thinking-about relation to dragons, but of engaging in the activity of thinking dragon-wise.
  •  3967
    The Three Circles of Consciousness
    In M. Guillot & M. Garcia-Carpintero (eds.), Self-Experience: Essays on Inner Awareness, Oxford University Press. pp. 169-191. 2023.
    A widespread assumption in current philosophy of mind is that a conscious state’s phenomenal properties vary with its representational contents. In this paper, I present (rather dogmatically) an alternative picture that recognizes two kinds of phenomenal properties that do not vary concomitantly with content. First, it admits phenomenal properties that vary rather with attitude: what it is like for me to see rain is phenomenally different from what it is like for me to remember (indistinguishabl…Read more
  • Intrinsic theory and the content of inner awareness
    Journal of Mind and Behavior 24 (2): 169-196. 2003.
    Consciosuness is the property mental-occurrence instances have when the subject has immediate awareness of them. According to intrinsic theory, this immediate awareness is intrinsic to the conscious4 mental-occurrence instance, whereas according to appendage theory, it forms a separate mental-occurrence instance. Assuming, rather than arguing for, the correctness of intrinsic theory, this paper investigates a number of theses about the specific intentional content of the immediate awareness buil…Read more
  •  237
    Self-Representationalism and the Explanatory Gap
    In JeeLoo Liu & John Perry (eds.), Consciousness and the Self: New Essays, Cambridge University Press. 2011.
    According to the self-representational theory of consciousness – self- representationalism for short – a mental state is phenomenally conscious when, and only when, it represents itself in the right way. In this paper, I consider how self- representationalism might address the alleged explanatory gap between phenomenal consciousness and physical properties. I open with a presentation of self- representationalism and the case for it (§1). I then present what I take to be the most promising …Read more
  •  2065
    Kantian Monism
    Philosophical Papers 41 (1): 23-56. 2012.
    Let ‘monism’ be the view that there is only one basic object—the world. Monists face the question of whether there are also non-basic objects. This is in effect the question of whether the world decomposes into parts. Jonathan Schaffer maintains that it does, Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč that it does not. In this paper, I propose a compromise view, which I call ‘Kantian monism.’ According to Kantian monism, the world decomposes into parts insofar as an ideal subject under ideal conditions would…Read more
  •  1450
    To a first approximation, ontology is concerned with what exists, metaontology with what it means to say that something exists. So understood, metaontology has been dominated by three views: (i) existence as a substantive first-order property that some things have and some do not, (ii) existence as a formal first-order property that everything has, and (iii) existence as a second-order property of existents’ distinctive properties. Each of these faces well-documented difficulties. In this chapte…Read more
  •  1658
    ‘Judgment’ is Brentano’s terms for any mental state liable to be true or false. This includes not only the products of conceptual thought, such as belief, but also perceptual experiences, such as seeing that the window was left open. ‘Every perception counts as a judgment,’ writes Brentano (1874: II, 50/1973a: 209). Accordingly, his theory of judgment is not exactly a theory of the same phenomenon we call today ‘judgment,’ but of a larger class of phenomena one (perhaps the main) species of whic…Read more
  •  453
    Cognitive Phenomenology as the Basis of Unconscious Content
    In Tim Bayne & Michelle Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 79--102. 2011.
    Since the seventies, it has been customary to assume that intentionality is independent of consciousness. Recently, a number of philosophers have rejected this assumption, claiming intentionality is closely tied to consciousness, inasmuch as non- conscious intentionality in some sense depends upon conscious intentionality. Within this alternative framework, the question arises of how to account for unconscious intentionality, and different authors have offered different accounts. In this paper, …Read more
  •  343
    Real narrow content
    Mind and Language 23 (3). 2008.
    The purpose of the present paper is to develop and defend an account of narrow content that would neutralize the commonplace charge that narrow content
  •  2879
    Fact-Introspection, Thing-Introspection, and Inner Awareness
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (1): 143-164. 2017.
    Phenomenal beliefs are beliefs about the phenomenal properties of one's concurrent conscious states. It is an article of common sense that such beliefs tend to be justified. Philosophers have been less convinced. It is sometimes claimed that phenomenal beliefs are not on the whole justified, on the grounds that they are typically based on introspection and introspection is often unreliable. Here we argue that such reasoning must guard against a potential conflation between two distinct introspec…Read more
  •  191
    Temporally Token-Reflexive Experiences
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4): 585-617. 2009.
    John Searle has argued that all perceptual experiences are token-reflexive, in the sense that they are constituents of their own veridicality conditions. Many philosophers have found the kind of token-reflexivity he attributes to experiences, which I will call _causal_ token-reflexivity, unfaithful to perceptual phenomenology. In this paper, I develop an argument for a different sort of token-reflexivity in perceptual (as well as some non- perceptual) experiences, which I will call _temporal_ to…Read more
  •  3190
    Consciousness as intransitive self-consciousness: Two views and an argument
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 103-132. 2003.
    The word ?consciousness? is notoriously ambiguous. This is mainly because it is not a term of art, but a mundane word we all use quite frequently, for different purposes and in different everyday contexts. In this paper, I discuss consciousness in one specific sense of the word. To avoid the ambiguities, I introduce a term of art ? intransitive self-consciousness ? and suggest that this form of self-consciousness is an essential component of the folk notion of consciousness. I then argue for a s…Read more
  •  350
    Perceptual experience, conscious content, and nonconceptual content
    Essays in Philosophy 5 (1): 1-14. 2004.
    One of the promising approaches to the problem of perceptual consciousness has been the representational theory, or representationalism. The idea is to reduce the phenomenal character of conscious perceptual experiences to the representational content of those experiences. Most representationalists appeal specifically to non-conceptual content in reducing phenomenal character to representational content. In this paper, I discuss a series of issues involved in this representationalist appeal to n…Read more
  •  452
    The new mysterianism and the thesis of cognitive closure
    Acta Analytica 18 (30-31): 177-191. 2003.
    The paper discusses Colin McGinn’s mysterianist approach to the phenomenon of consciousness. According to McGinn, consciousness is, in and of itself, a fully natural phenomenon, but we humans are just cognitively closed to it, meaning that we cannot in principle understand its nature. I argue that, on a proper conception of the relation between an intellectual problem and its solution, we may well not know what the solution is to a problem we understand, or we may not understand exactly what the…Read more
  •  423
    Phenomenal Intentionality (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Phenomenal intentionality is supposed to be a kind of directedness of the mind onto the world that is grounded in the conscious feel of mental life. This book of new essays explores a number of issues raised by the notion of phenomenal intentionality
  •  1104
    Moral Phenomenology
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, John Wiley & Sons. 2021.
    In the philosophy of mind, the study of mental life has tended to focus on three central aspects of mental states: their representational content, their functional role, and their phenomenal character. The representational content of a mental state is what the state represents, what it is about; its functional role is the role it plays within the functional organization of the subject’s overall psychology; its phenomenal character is the experiential or subjective quality that goes with what it …Read more