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Consciousness as Existence, and the End of Intentionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

Extract

It was only in the last century of the past millennium that the Philosophy of Mind began to flourish as a part of philosophy with some autonomy, enough for students to face examination papers in it by itself. Despite an inclination in some places to give it the name of Philosophical Psychology, it is not any science of the mind. This is not to say that the Philosophy of Mind is unempirical, but that it is like the rest of philosophy in being more taken up with good thinking about experienced facts than with establishing, elaborating or using them. Logic, if not formal logic, is the core of all philosophy, and so of the Philosophy of Mind. The discipline's first question is what it is for a thing to be conscious, whatever its capabilities. The discipline's second question is how a thing's being conscious is related to the physical world, including chairs, brains and bodily movements—the mind-brain or mind-body problem.

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Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2001

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References

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3 By my understanding, Functionalism—serious and exclusive Functionalism—is within Naturalism, as is Cognitive Science with Philosophical Ambition, and also the doctrine that conscious events are physical events in heads but different from physical events recognized now in neuroscience. For a version of this latter view, see my Consciousness, Neural Functionalism, Real Subjectivity,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 32/4 (October, 1995)Google Scholar. Thomas Hobbes, U. T. Place and Patricia Churchland count as Eliminative Materialists, as do those Behaviourists who said that conscious events are no more than behaviour, the latter being movements.

4 For some more along these lines, and also the objection that Functionalism despite its pretensions is in fact no advance on Eliminative Materialism, see my ‘Functionalism, Identity Theories, The Union Theory,’ in Warner, R. & Szubka, T., (eds), The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 215–35.Google Scholar

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19 Op. cit., pp. 246, 238, 243.

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21 ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental,’ p. 244.

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23 Intentionality, p. 6.

24 Intentionality, p. 4.

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30 Searle takes the intentionality tradition before him to be ‘something of a mess.’ Intentionality, p. 1.

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34 See intentionality doctrine V, p. 14.