Tony Cheng

In this letter we focus on the cognitive science of consciousness. The general message is that, while this interdisciplinary area has made much progress in recent years, there is a tendency of downplaying conceptual issues, and therefore underestimating the difficulties of various problems. We briefly focus on a few prominent examples only, due to the space limit, but the general message should be clear: this recent tendency can be problematic for the progress of the consciousness branch of cognitive sciences.

John McDowell's philosophical ideas are both influential and comprehensive, encompassing philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and the history of philosophy. This book is a much-needed systematic overview of McDowell's thought that offers a clear and accessible route through the main elements of his philosophy. Arguing that the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent, the book examines and critically engages with McDowell's views on naturalism of second nature, the inner space model, intentionality, personhood and practical wisdom. The book presents novel discussions on the debates between McDowell and other key philosophers, including Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Brandom, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Immanuel Kant, amongst others. Demonstrating a thorough understanding of McDowell's work, Tony Cheng makes connections to both the phenomenological tradition and cognitive sciences to show the wider relevance of McDowell's philosophy. In doing so, he sheds light on how influential McDowell's thought is to the analytic tradition.

In The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019), Declan Smithies has carried out a thorough radical internalist programme. Along the way he compares and contrasts many different views, including a group he calls “radical externalism.” From the labels, it might seem that radical internalism and radical externalism must be very different in their core commitments. In this short note, I will single out a version of radical externalism – factivism, more specifically John McDowell’s version (1994, 1995, 2011) – and argue that actually this version has many similarities with Smithies radical internalism. Where there are differences, they do not obviously lie at the internalist/externalist juncture. The main point of this comparison is that philosophical positions that seem very different can share much common ground, and in seeing this one can be in a better position to understand the crucial points of disagreement.

In “A conceptual framework for consciousness,” Michael Graziano provides a substantive conceptual framework for explaining consciousness. In this commentary I will focus on the way Graziano sets up the issue, which fails to capture the opposition accurately. The opponent of Graziano’s approach is no mysticism, but non-cognitive theories exemplified by, e.g., Ned Block’s Overflow thesis. Without identifying the opponent accurately, its significance cannot be fully appreciated. In this commentary I attempt to capture the real disagreement to facilitate further communications. ER -

Attention is Cognitive Unison is probably the only book exclusively on attention in the philosophy literature in the past few decades. Before this, of course we have some nice books on relevant themes, for example John Campbell's Reference and Consciousness (2002). However, although Campbell invokes the notion of attention to do some explanatory works, his exposition of the very idea of attention is not as thoroughgoing as Mole's book. As Mole's summary of relevant history shows, in philosophy there was Alan White's Attention (1964), but that was almost half a century ago. This alone will guarantee the historical importance of Mole's book, but it has many other merits as well.

Recently philosopher David Chalmers published his second book. As the first one, the main theme is consciousness. This collection of papers is divided into six parts by the author. They are the problems, the science, the metaphysics, the concepts, the contents, and the unity of consciousness. They cover most aspects of consciousness discussed in philosophy of mind. Part II (the science) and part IV (concepts) can be seen as the epistemology of consciousness; part V (the contents) and part VI (the unity) can be seen as further aspects of the metaphysics of consciousness. Thus, we can invoke the familiar metaphysics / epistemology distinction to conceptualize Chalmers's project of understanding consciousness.