Consciousness

Consciousness is a thought-provoking collection of classic and contemporary philosophical literature on consciousness, bringing together influential scholarship by seminal thinkers and the work of emerging voices who reflect the diversity of the field. Editors Josh Weisberg and David Rosenthal have selected discussions that animate modern debates and connect consciousness to broader philosophical topics.

Providing an expansive view of the philosophical landscape of consciousness studies, this carefully calibrated reader features classic work from the past four decades by seminal thinkers such as Thomas Nagel, David Lewis, Ned Block, Gilbert Harman, and Daniel Dennett, as well as important recent work from David Chalmers, Fiona Macperson, Joseph Levine, Kathleen Akins, and other contemporary philosophers.

Divided into five parts, Consciousness explores the nature of consciousness, consciousness and knowledge, qualitative consciousness, and theories of consciousness. A final section on agency and physicalism includes work by Galen Strawson and a previously unpublished article by Myrto Mylopoulos.

Philosophically challenging yet accessible to students, Consciousness is an ideal reader for many undergraduate and graduate courses on consciousness or philosophy of mind, as well as a useful supplementary text for general classes in philosophy and a valuable reference text for philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and psychologists.

Josh Weisberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Houston. His work is focused on the philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. He is author of Consciousness: Key Concepts in Philosophy, an introductory book on the philosophical problem of consciousness, as well as numerous articles on a range of topics in philosophy of mind.

David Rosenthal is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Coordinator of the Graduate Center's Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science. The leading authority on higher-order theories of consciousness, Rosenthal's work focuses on philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive science.

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
JOSH WEISBERG AND DAVID ROSENTHAL

Part I Problems of Consciousness 15

1 What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 17
THOMAS NAGEL

2 What Is It Like to Be Boring and Myopic? 25
KATHLEEN AKINS

3 Consciousness and Its Place in Nature 52
DAVID J. CHALMERS

4 The Explanatory Gap 79
JOSEPH LEVINE

5 A Third-Person Approach to Consciousness 94
DANIEL C. DENNETT

Part II Consciousness and Knowledge 107

6 What Mary Didn’t Know 109
FRANK JACKSON

7 In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy 113
KATALIN BALOG

8 What Experience Teaches 126
DAVID LEWIS

Part III Qualitative Consciousness 141

9 On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness 143
NED BLOCK

10 The Intrinsic Quality of Experience 175
GILBERT HARMAN

11 How to Think about Mental Qualities 186
DAVID ROSENTHAL

Part IV Theories of Consciousness 203

12 Conscious Experience 205
FRED DRETSKE

13 The Same-Order Monitoring Theory of Consciousness 219
URIAH KRIEGEL

14 What Kind of Awareness is Awareness of Awareness? 237
MICHELLE MONTAGUE

15 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness 249
JOSH WEISBERG

Part V Agency and Physicalism 263

16 Perceptual Consciousness as a Mental Activity 265
SUSANNA SCHELLENBERG

17 The Proprietary Nature of Agentive Experience 280
MYRTO MYLOPOULOS

18 Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism 294
GALEN STRAWSON

19 Property Dualism and the Merits of Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem: A Reply to Strawson 311
FIONA MACPHERSON

Select Bibliography 322

Index 327

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