Consciousness
Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective
Carruthers, Peter,
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland
Print publication date: 2005
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2005 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-927736-0 doi:10.1093/0199277362.001.0001 |
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Abstract:
This book is a collection of essays about consciousness and related issues. It focuses mostly on developing, defending, and exploring the implications of one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which the author now refers to as ‘dual-content theory’. But other issues discussed include: the nature of reductive explanation in general; the nature of conscious thought and the plausibility of some form of eliminativism about conscious thought (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness); the appropriateness of sympathy for creatures whose mental states are not phenomenally conscious ones; and the psychological continuities and similarities that exist between minds that lack phenomenally conscious mental states and minds that possess them.
Keywords: phenomenal consciousness, conscious thought, reductive explanation, animal suffering, animal mental states Table of Contents
Preface
CHAPTER 1.
Introduction
CHAPTER 2.
Reductive Explanation and the ‘Explanatory Gap’
CHAPTER 3.
Natural Theories of Consciousness
CHAPTER 4.
HOP over FOR, HOT Theory
CHAPTER 5.
Phenomenal Concepts and Higher-Order Experiences
CHAPTER 6.
Dual-Content Theory: the Explanatory Advantages
CHAPTER 7.
Conscious Thinking: Language Or Elimination?
CHAPTER 8.
Conscious Experience Versus Conscious Thought
CHAPTER 9.
Sympathy and Subjectivity
CHAPTER 10.
Suffering without Subjectivity
CHAPTER 11.
Why the Question of Animal Consciousness Might not Matter Very Much
CHAPTER 12.
On Being Simple-Minded
Bibliography
Index
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