Consciousness

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 A final section on agency and physicalism includes work by Galen Strawson and a previously unpublished article by Myrto Mylopoulos.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.

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