The Varieties of Consciousness

ISBN-13: 9780199846122 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 296 str.

Uriah Kriegel

Opis

Recent work on consciousness has featured a number of debates on the existence and character of controversial types of phenomenal experience. Perhaps the best-known is the debate over the existence of a sui generis, irreducible cognitive phenomenology - a phenomenology proper to thought. Another concerns the existence of a sui generis phenomenology of agency. Such debates bring up a more general question: how many types of sui generis, irreducible, basic, primitive phenomenology do we have to posit to just be able to describe the stream of consciousness? This book offers a first general attempt to answer this question in contemporary philosophy. It develops a unified framework for systematically addressing this question and applies it to six controversial types of phenomenal experience, namely, those associated with thought and judgment, will and agency, pure apprehension, emotion, moral thought and experience, and the experience of freedom.

Recenzje

Deftly combining analytic rigor with sustained, careful attention to phenomenology, The Varieties of Consciousness develops and defends a systematic, nuanced account of the internal structure of phenomenal experience. The book's framing objective is to identify the basic, irreducible types of phenomenology, those that jointly determine the totality of phenomenal experience in all its richness. But it also makes important contributions to an impressive array of ancillary topics, including philosophical methodology, the theory of emotions, and the debate over cognitivism about ethics. It is required reading for those working in the philosophy of mind, and will also be of interest to specialists in moral psychology and epistemology.

O autorze

Uriah Kriegel is a research director at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. He is the author of Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory (OUP, 2011) and The Sources of Intentionality (OUP, 2011), as well as the editor of a dozen collections and the author of 70-odd articles.