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The Significance of Consciousness / Charles Siewert.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [1998]Copyright date: ©1998Edition: Core TextbookDescription: 1 online resource (392 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691027241
  • 9781400822720
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 126 191
LOC classification:
  • B808.9.S54 1998
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1 First-Person Knowledge -- CHAPTER 2. Third-Person Doubts about First-Person Warrant -- CHAPTER 3. Phenomenal Consciousness -- CHAPTER 4. Varieties of Consciousness Neglect -- CHAPTER 5. Preventing Neglect -- CHAPTER 6. Consciousness and Self-Reflection -- CHAPTER 7. Visual Experience: Intentionality and Richness -- CHAPTER 8. Conscious Thought -- CHAPTER 9. The Importance of Consciousness -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX
Summary: Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781400822720

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1 First-Person Knowledge -- CHAPTER 2. Third-Person Doubts about First-Person Warrant -- CHAPTER 3. Phenomenal Consciousness -- CHAPTER 4. Varieties of Consciousness Neglect -- CHAPTER 5. Preventing Neglect -- CHAPTER 6. Consciousness and Self-Reflection -- CHAPTER 7. Visual Experience: Intentionality and Richness -- CHAPTER 8. Conscious Thought -- CHAPTER 9. The Importance of Consciousness -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)