The Nature of Consciousness
The Nature of Consciousness
In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.
- Offers a very useful survey of the main positions in the field as well as advancing the author's own
- Clearly written and argued
- Consciousness a topic of hot debate in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science
Reviews & endorsements
'Enter The Nature of Consciousness, a book filled with scholarly argument, well-developed - but also well-defined - complex jargon, excellent critique of all the previous important works of the field (thought experiments included) and written by a philosophy lecturer. This book is required reading not only for those wanting to get to grips with what is going on in consciousness studies, but for those who are dissatisfied with the current accounts …' Metapsychology
Product details
August 2007Paperback
9780521039475
256 pages
225 × 153 × 15 mm
0.391kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1. The problem of phenomenal consciousness
- 2. Consciousness and supervenience
- 3. The explanatory gap
- 4. Consciousness and higher-order experience
- 5. Consciousness and higher-order thoughts
- 6. The structure of consciousness
- 7. What it is like
- 8. Against objectualism II: mistakes about the way things seem
- 9. Consciousness and representation
- 10. Consciousness and the natural order
- Bibliography
- Index.
