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Philosophy of Consciousness
Also available from Bloomsbury:
The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy

The Bloomsbury Companion to Epistemology
The Bloomsbury Companion to Metaphysics
The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophical Logic
The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind
The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Consciousness
Edited by
Dale Jacquette
Bloomsbury Academic
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Names: Jacquette, Dale, author.
Title: The Bloomsbury companion to the philosophy of consciousness / Dale Jacquette.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
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In memory of Dale Jacquette, 1953–2016
vi
Think of consciousness as a territory just opening its settlement and

exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set
it to music, frame it in images—but even this fails to do justice to the
vision. Obviously consciousness is infinitely bigger than Oklahoma.
—Saul Bellow, Collected Stories (2001), Afterword, 441.
Contents
Contributorsix
Prefacexi
1 Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness Dale Jacquette 1
Part 1 Historical Development
2 The Hard Problem of Understanding Descartes on

Consciousness Katherine Morris 11
3 Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept of Consciousness Liliana Albertazzi 27
4 Wittgenstein and the Concept of Consciousness Garry L. Hagberg 57
5 ‘Ordinary’ Consciousness Julia Tanney 78
Part 2 Groundbreaking Concepts of Consciousness
6 Consciousness, Representation and the Hard Problem Keith Lehrer 93

7 The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of ‘Knowing
What it’s Like’ Daniel Stoljar 108
8 Conscious and Unconscious Mental States Richard Fumerton 126
9 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness Rocco J. Gennaro 142
10 Kripke on Mind–Body Identity Scott Soames 170
Part 3 Metaphilosophy of Consciousness Studies
11 Understanding Consciousness by Building It Michael Graziano

and Taylor W. Webb 187
12 The Illusion of Conscious Thought Peter Carruthers 211
13 Actualism About Consciousness Affirmed Ted Honderich 234
14 Cracking the Hard Problem of Consciousness Dale Jacquette 258
viii Contents
Part 4 Mental Causation, Natural Law and Intentionality of

Conscious States
15 Toward Axiomatizing Consciousness Selmer Bringsjord,

Paul Bello and Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu 289
16 Intentionality and Consciousness Carlo Ierna 325
17 Cognitive Approaches to Phenomenal Consciousness Pete Mandik 347
18 Free Will and Consciousness Alfred Mele 371
19 Notes Towards a Metaphysics of Mind Joseph Margolis 389
Part 5 Resources
20 Annotated Bibliography 413

21 Research Resources 428
22 A–Z Key Terms and Concepts 437
Index 471
Contributors
Liliana Albertazzi Michael Graziano

Principal Investigator Professor, Department of Psychology
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences and Neuroscience
(CIMEC) Princeton University
Professor at the Department of Princeton, NJ, USA
Humanities
Garry Hagberg
University of Trento
James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of
Trento, ITALY
Philosophy and Aesthetics
Selmer Bringsjord Department of Philosophy
Chair, Department of Cognitive Bard College
Science Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Ted Honderich
Professor of Computer Science and
Grote Professor Emeritus of the
Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Mind and Logic
Troy, NY, USA
University College London
Peter Caruthers London, England, UK
Professor, Department of
Carlo Ierna
Philosophy
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Maryland
Research Institute for Philosophy
College Park, MD, USA
and Religious Studies (OFR)
Richard Fumerton Department of Philosophy and
Professor, Department of Religious Studies—Philosophy
Philosophy Universiteit Utrecht
The University of Iowa Utrecht, THE NETHERLANDS
Iowa City, IA, USA
Dale Jacquette
Rocco J. Gennaro Senior Professorial Chair
Professor and Department Chair of Division for Logic and Theoretical
Philosophy Philosophy
University of Southern Indiana University of Bern
Evansville, IN, USA BERN, SWITZERLAND
x Contributors
Keith Lehrer Florida State University

Regent’s Professor Emeritus of Tallahassee, FL, USA
Philosophy
Katherine Morris
University of Arizona
Supernumerary Fellow in
Tucson, AZ, USA
Philosophy
Pete Mandik Mansfield College
Professor, Department of Oxford University
Philosophy Oxford, England, UK
William Paterson University
Scott Soames
Wayne, NJ, USA
Professor of Philosophy
Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology
University of Southern California
Washington University
School of Philosophy
St. Louis, MO, USA
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Joseph Margolis
Daniel Stoljar
Laura H. Carnell Professor of
Philosophy
Australian National University
Department of Philosophy
(ANU)
Temple University
Canberra, AUSTRALIA
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Julia Tanney
Alfred Mele
Independent Scholar
William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister
Preface
The chapters collected in this book investigate philosophical aspects, problems

and challenges in the concept of consciousness. Consciousness studies are a
subdivision in philosophy of mind with a recent history and unique character
that sets them slightly apart from other developments in philosophy of mind or
philosophical psychology otherwise conceived. I am grateful to Fiona Dillier
for her able assistance in collating materials for the Part V Resources section,
with detailed Annotated Bibliography, electronic Research Resources, and A–Z
of Key Terms and Concepts. Thanks are due especially to contributing authors
for their excellent chapters that present the recent history and contemporary
thinking in philosophy of consciousness.
xii
1
Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness

Dale Jacquette
‘Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.’
Kingsley Amis
The philosophy of consciousness is a relatively new concentration of interest

within the more widely recognized general field of philosophical psychology
and philosophy of mind. The concept of consciousness is not taken for granted,
but subjected to close critical scrutiny. What exactly is meant by speaking of
consciousness? What sort of thing, beginning categorically? If we are not
to simply spoon up synonyms, then philosophy of consciousness assumes a
specific burden in philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind, what kind
of thing, ontologically, metaphysically speaking, is a moment of consciousness?
What are the epistemically justified ways of discerning their qualities and
relations? If moments of consciousness have as they are frequently said to have,
undeniably if phenomenology is consulted, qualia and intentionality, then what
kind of thing is a moment of consciousness to possess such apparently physically
irreducible kinds of properties?
These are not new questions. Nor need there be perceived any urgency in
addressing these conceptual questions about and investigations of the properties
of consciousness exactly now. To the extent that we question the concept of
consciousness in approaching the traditional mind–body problem, the analysis
of the concept and identity conditions for persons, inquiry in philosophy of
mind becomes literally self-conscious. In the process, we are made conscious of
the centrality of the concept of consciousness in every aspect of the philosophy
of mind. Philosophy of consciousness focuses attention and places emphasis on
the concept category of consciousness, which needless to say has been present
all along. It is in one sense precisely what thinkers in the philosophy of mind
have always been talking about. The challenge is to try explaining what that
2 The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness
means, what philosophy of mind has, perhaps less self-consciously had, in its
sights from ancient times. There is no competition between philosophy of mind
and contemporary philosophy of consciousness. Philosophy of consciousness
extensionally is subsumed by philosophy of mind. A discovery in philosophy of
consciousness is automatically a contribution to philosophy of mind, even if not
conversely.
Philosophy of consciousness can venture subdivisions of its subject that might
not have occurred in philosophy of mind lacking explicit engagement with the
concept of consciousness. Consciousness is said to come in three varieties – in
several terminologies the perceptual, affective and cognitive. Whether or not
this is correct is not so much the point as that it offers something substantive
about the nature of consciousness for philosophical consideration. What does it
mean, and what are the arguments? What are the relevant identity conditions,
if the perceptual, affective and cognitive are different kinds or applications of
consciousness, if there is or cannot be anything common underlying all three,
to which all three kinds or modes of consciousness can be reduced? Are there
three consciousnesses, or three capabilities of a single unified consciousness?
Can consciousness fail to be unified? What would that mean? What ontic and
explanatory models could be invoked in the metaphysics of three kinds or modes
of consciousness?
In the science of psychology we can afford to be indifferent about these
questions, but not here in the philosophy of consciousness. We must arrive at
defensible identity conditions for consciousness. It should suffice to understand
what it is for something to be a single moment of consciousness carried along
metaphorically speaking in a progression streaming in sync with the conscious
subject’s perception of the passing of time. This too has proved elusive. It is
to attempt expressing in words the necessary and sufficient conditions for
a thinking subject to think a single conscious thought. Anyone who has not
tried but considers the task trivial need only continue reading as the authors
assembled here raise philosophical difficulties for the concept and explore the
perplexing nature of consciousness. There is nothing more familiar to each
individual conscious being, and by reputation few things more resistant to exact
articulation, let alone reductive conceptual analysis.
There is by reputation again supposed to be a ‘hard’ problem of consciousness.
What seems the hardest is saying exactly what the problem is meant. What is it
supposed to be so hard to do? If it is to explain how living tissues can be related
to the existence of moments of consciousness, then more must be said as to
what sorts of explanations can satisfy and for what reasons they would finally
Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness 3
answer the hard question. Otherwise it is not clear that a question is being asked
at all, of any level of difficulty. Why should it not do then, to say that qualia
and intentionality supervene on a conscious thinking subject’s functioning
neurophysiology, to which it can be further added that qualia and intentionality
are emergent properties that cannot be fully explained in terms exclusively
of the purely physical properties of their supervenience base? Philosophy
of consciousness taking inquiry in that direction opens many avenues of
theory development with potential implications for analysis of the concept
of perception, reasoning, mental action, passion and suffering, the concept of
person, freedom of the will, action theory, phenomenological epistemology, and
much else besides.
Many philosophers of consciousness will not want to pursue all of these
possibilities. There is thankfully no party line philosophically in consciousness
studies. Instead there is commitment to improved understanding of the concept
and properties of consciousness insofar as these can be rigorously investigated
and conclusions defended by reasonable arguments. Engagement in philosophy
of consciousness is a concentrated study in philosophy of mind, dedicated
specifically to understanding the existence and nature of consciousness, beginning
with a single moment of consciousness abstracted in isolation from the streaming
progression of conscious moments. If consciousness is something like a streaming
film, as Saul Bellow mentions in the book’s quotation, with a technicolor sound
track and all the other sensory inputs of a richly experienced individual moment
of consciousness, then we proceed analytically by asking what is a single frame in
the movie and how it is linked up and connects together with all the other frames
running through the chain of an individual subjective consciousness.
These themes are examined from multiple perspectives in the present
collection’s four main parts. The Historical Development of the philosophy
of consciousness presented in Part I examines highlights selected from the
history of the subject and explains their relation to the evolution of the subject
among philosophers of many different orientations. Katherine Morris begins
the book, appropriately, by examining, “The Hard Problem of Understanding
Descartes on Consciousness.” Liliana Albertazzi in her comprehensive study,
‘Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept of Consciousness’, examines Franz Brentano’s
descriptive and experimental psychology against the background of his thesis
of the characteristic intentionality or ‘aboutness’ of thought. Albertazzi draws
on her expertise in perceptual psychology to position herself authoritatively to
conclude with Brentano and by implication with Aristotle in De Anima that
even complete knowledge of the brain and its workings will never adequately
explain the concept, possibility, structure or phenomenological contents of

consciousness revealed only to Aristotle’s ‘inner sense’ of the active intellect
or Brentano’s faculty of ‘inner perception’. Garry L. Hagberg in ‘Wittgenstein
and the Concept of Consciousness’ historically-philosophically examines
especially the later Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks relevant to understanding
the nature of consciousness. Hagberg interprets Wittgenstein especially in
the posthumous Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, also Zettel and
Blue and Brown Books, as opening his discussion to a double entendre based
on explicating several meanings of the colloquial phrase, ‘it is not what you
think’. Julia Tanney in ‘“Ordinary” Consciousness’ considers a common-sense
approach to the problems of consciousness that require theory to become
more self-conscious about the questions it asks, the kinds of answers it wants
and expects, and that it could meaningfully accept. The chapter exemplifies
‘ordinary language’ considerations about the concepts and terminologies
conventionally adopted in an effort to express conscious experience, notably
the ‘what it is like’ vocabulary of qualia. She considers zombies’ arguments
from this point of view and presses received philosophies of consciousness
with a dilemma whereby the possibility of zombies is conceivable only if
sufficient inner mental life of precisely the sort in question in the internalism-
externalism debate is built into the concept of conscious non-zombies. The
thought experiment consequently does not get off the ground without
reasoning in a vicious circle.
Part II, Groundbreaking Concepts of Consciousness, opens with an
important new chapter by Keith Lehrer titled, ‘Consciousness, Representation
and the Hard Problem’. Lehrer elaborates a representational theory of
consciousness that makes reflexive exemplarization a key concept in
understanding the facts and external world correspondences and truth-
conditions for states of consciousness. With one eye on semantics and another
on epistemology against a realist metaphysical background, Lehrer makes
a case for understanding consciousness and addressing David J. Chalmers’s
mention of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness as a self-presentation
representation that ‘radiates’ beyond itself to represent the external world,
however accurately and with whatever epistemic caveats and cautions. Daniel
Stoljar in The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of ‘Knowing
What it’s Like’ considers a response to the knowledge argument based on
Frank Jackson’s colour scientist thought experiment in his (1983) essay,
‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’. The suggestion that Mary, the colour scientist, comes
to ‘know what it is like’ to see red for the first time is judged ambiguous by
Stoljar between an interrogative reading and a free relative reading. Stoljar
argues that the ambiguity counterobjection is unsuccessful because the crucial
concept supporting the knowledge argument can be reformulated to avoid
the response. Stoljar distinguishes the what-it-is-like objection from two
related proposals in the literature by David Lewis and Michael Tye. Richard
Fumerton in his chapter, ‘Conscious and Unconscious Mental States’, considers
whether there could be such a thing as an unconscious mental state. The idea
is similar to that of the Freudian Unbewußt, where unconscious mental states
must have intention, even qualia, and be capable of causing or contributing
causally to a thinking subject’s external behaviour. Fumerton draws intriguing
connections between the concept of conscious versus unconscious mental
states, carefully defined and explicated, and such now-classic problems
in philosophy of consciousness as the knowledge argument and correct
interpretation of Jackson’s colour scientist thought experiment. Fumerton
is motivated throughout his chapter by the consideration that the existence
of mental states is disclosed to the individual phenomenologically, and that
intuitively it appears at least logically possible for such states to exist even
when the thinking subject is unaware of their occurrence. Rocco J. Gennaro
in ‘Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness’ addresses the key question he
thinks should be answered by any theory of consciousness: What makes
a mental state a conscious mental state? He introduces an overall approach
to consciousness called representationalism, and discusses Tye’s First-Order
Representationalism, which Gennaro finds inadequate. Gennaro accordingly
presents three major versions of a higher-order representationalism (HOR):
higher-order thought (HOT) theory, dispositional HOT theory, and higher-
order perception theory. He considers objections to HOR, to which he offers
replies. He develops a connection between higher-order representational
theories of consciousness conceptualism. He critically examines the claim that
the representational content of a perceptual experience is entirely determined
by the conceptual capacities the perceiver brings to bear in the experience.
Scott Soames in ‘Kripke on Mind-Body Identity’ critically assesses Saul A.
Kripke’s efforts to establish mind–body property non-identity in Naming
and Necessity and precursor essay, ‘Identity and Necessity’. The argument is
important because it intertwines considerations of modal semantics, identity
theory, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Soames’s purpose is to explicate
accurately an inference that has been muddled in the secondary philosophical
literature to some extent, and to evaluate precisely the essential moves in
Kripke’s reasoning against the background of their broader implications for

the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Part III, Metaphilosophy of Consciousness Studies, begins with a constructive
explanation of consciousness. Michael Graziano and Taylor W. Webb, in
‘Understanding Consciousness by Building It’, offer to explain basic concepts
of consciousness by describing in plausible detail how a conscious entity might
be systematically built, using technologies and programming protocols already
available today. By establishing a hierarchy of nested internet-based information
databases, and most importantly analysing beforehand in preparation the
kinds of information concerning which thinking subjects can be expected to
be conscious. The authors anticipate the demands on a conscious machine and
carpenter-in data and metadata of several kinds structured and accessible to
question-triggered information retrieval of whatever sort is generally available
to and required of the reports of developing consciousness. Peter Caruthers in
‘The Illusion of Conscious Thought’ takes a refreshingly skeptical view of the
existence of consciousness, supported by an independently interesting volley
of arguments against the reality of consciousness, in support of the contrary
thesis that consciousness as defined by Caruthers is an illusion. The reason
is that on the strength of Caruthers’s main distinction between conscious
and unconscious propositional attitude-events and the categorization of all
‘thoughts’ as propositional attitude-events all ‘thoughts’ so understood are
unconscious. Significantly, Caruthers’s characterization of ‘thoughts’ explicitly
excludes perception and affection, applying exclusively to enlanguaged
cognition. Ted Honderich in ‘Actualism About Consciousness Reaffirmed’
offers an explication and philosophical defence of his unique analysis of actual
consciousness. He divides consciousness into three distinct types or modes –
perceptual, cognitive and affective. He identifies five ‘leading ideas’ about
consciousness extracted from recent philosophical literature on the nature of
our subject as a starting place for inquiry, primarily to dispel the assumption
that consciousness is monolithic in meaning. Honderich outlines a metaphysics
of physical reality that has two aspects – the unitary objective physical world
and all the individual subjective worlds in which conscious participates, resides,
perceives, acts in, and the like. Honderich explains main theoretical explanatory
and problem-solving advantages of actual consciousness theory and recommends
it on the grounds of avoiding difficulties to which other concepts of consciousness
are liable. Dale Jacquette in his highly programmatic contribution, ‘Cracking the
Hard Problem of Consciousness’, describes a new paradigm for understanding
the concept of consciousness in fundamental metaphysical terms. The proposal
for an Attributive-Dynamic (AD) model of consciousness explains streaming

consciousness as the brain’s dynamic activity in attributing information data
packages of properties to passing moments of time as predication objects.
Streaming consciousness is the brain’s successive attributions of information
clusters to distinct moments of time as individual conscious states or moments
in the stream. Implications and theoretical applications of the analysis are briefly
suggestively explored. Foremost among the proposal’s touted advantages is its
essentialist explanation of the manifest but otherwise inexplicably intimate
connection between streaming consciousness and conscious awareness of the
passage of time. The model embodies an analytic answer to Edmund Husserl’s
quest for a phenomenology of internal time consciousness.
Part IV, Mental Causation, Natural Law, and Intentionality of Conscious
States’. Selmer Bringsjord and Paul Bellow’s chapter ‘Toward Axiomatizig
Consciousness’ critically discusses the concept posed in the title of their
essay. Carlo Ierna in ‘Intentionality and Consciousness’ chronicles important
moments in the historical phenomenological tradition in philosophy of
consciousness. He considers in detail the immanent intentionality thesis
in Brentano’s Psychology, and Husserl’s canonical writings. Ierna contrasts
the intentionality tradition in early phenomenology with the rootless
intentionalism of John R. Searle. He makes instructive comparisons
between the intentionality commitments of these first two related and third
disparate contemporary thinkers dedicated to understanding the aboutness
of consciousness. Pete Mandik continues the discussion with his chapter
‘Cognitive Approaches to Phenomenal Consciousness’. Alfred Mele in
‘Free Will and Consciousness’ studies the longstanding thorny problem of
human free will versus determinism through the lens of Benjamin Libet’s
and followers’ controversial experiments in reportings of and neuromuscular
activation times. Mele argues that recent findings bear on the question
whether there can be neuroscientific evidence for the nonexistence of free
will. He provides empirical, conceptual and terminological background to
the topic, and explores the status of generalizations from alleged findings
about decisions or intentions in an experimental setting of a particular kind
to all decisions and intentions. Casting doubt on the experimental findings
and their implications, Mele disconnects recent Libet-inspired experimental
findings from the ambitious conclusions offered on their foundation for the
conclusion that the sense of free will at the ground of free and responsible
action is delusional. Joseph Margolis completes the book with his thoughts on
‘Toward a Metaphysics of Mind’.
Then follows Part V, Resources, with further annotated readings, electronic

website materials, and an A–Z Key Terms and Concepts guide to the vocabulary
and categories prevalent in contemporary philosophy of consciousness.
A man’s thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison

with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Part One
Historical Development
10
2
The Hard Problem of Understanding

Descartes on Consciousness
Katherine Morris
Descartes does not make extensive use of the terms ‘consciousness’ (conscientia,
conscience) and ‘conscious’ (conscius, conscient) in his corpus.1 (A further
complication which I ignore for present purposes: there is a range of terms
apart from ‘conscientia’ which, as their context indicates, means the same
thing to Descartes, for example, ‘apperception immediate’. These terms,
as well as ‘conscientia’, are usually translated as ‘awareness’ or ‘immediate
awareness’ in CSM.) Nonetheless, his conception of consciousness has been
widely misunderstood, and these misunderstandings tend to carry further
misconstructions in their wake. I will in what follows use the term ‘conscientia’
(and, occasionally, ‘conscius’) rather than ‘consciousness’ (and ‘conscious’) as a
reminder of this danger.2
I will offer an interpretation of Descartes’s conception of conscientia that has
some continuities with scholastic usage, although I won’t review that complex
usage here.3 In particular, I will suggest (a) that conscientia retains (albeit in a
complex and indirect way) its etymological links with scientia (knowledge), and
(more controversially and more speculatively) (b) that conscientia also retains
its etymological links with conscience. (In fact I will suggest that the relevant
notion of conscience is itself a form of knowledge, viz. knowledge of one’s own
actions.) The interpretation I offer also draws on some concepts taken from
Sartre, and thus has some continuities with the usage of some twentieth-century
French philosophers.4 Such continuities hardly constitute an argument in favour
of this interpretation; nonetheless they perhaps provide some reassurance that
the suggested interpretation might be on the right lines.
Introduction: Conscientia and thought
It is clear that Descartes draws some kind of connection between conscientia and
thought. It has been argued that he draws two different kinds of connections,
thereby indicating two different conceptions of conscientia. (Radner 1988:
445–52 calls these C1 and C2 respectively.)5 There are passages where Descartes
apparently equates ‘thought’ and ‘conscientia’ (e.g. AT VII 176, CSM II 124:
‘the common conception of thought or perception or consciousness’), and in
particular there are passages where he uses ‘conscientia’ to refer to one type of
thought, namely ‘seeming’ (e.g. he refers to our conscientia of walking (AT VII
353, CSM II 244), and clearly means our seeming to walk).6 There are other
passages where, rather than equating thought and conscientia, he sees conscientia
as, in a sense yet to be explicated, some kind of awareness of thought; it is this
sense (Radner’s C2) on which I will be concentrating here. (Hereafter, I will
simply refer to ‘conscientia’ without the number, but this must be understood.)
These two passages in particular will be our primary focus; the first comes from
the Second Replies as a definition preceding his setting-out of his arguments
in more geometrico, the second from the Principles:
[1] I use this term [‘thought’] to include everything that is within us in such a
way that we are immediately aware of it. (AT 7:160, CSM II 113)
[2] By the term ‘thought’, I understand everything which we are aware of as

happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it. (AT VIIIA 6, CSM
I 195)
These are clearly meant as explanations of the term ‘thought’, not of the term
‘conscientia’; but we can use these passages to help us understand what he meant
by ‘conscientia’.
Passage [1] is followed by ‘Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the
imagination and the senses are thoughts’, and passage [2] by a variant on this,
both echoing the well-known passage in M2 which asserts that
[3] A thing that thinks . . . [is a] thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies,
is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. (AT VII
28, CSM II 19)
In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on those operations of the mind
which have to do with the human being as union of mind and body. Thus the first
substantial section focuses on conscientia in connection with the operations of the
senses and imagination, the second in connection with the operations of the will
The Hard Problem of Understanding Descartes on Consciousness 13
(which are particularly relevant for the links between conscientia and conscience).7
I take it that we also have conscientia of purely intellectual thoughts, but the issues
are more complex and interesting in respect of these other kinds of cases.
1 Conscientia and the operations of the senses and

imagination
Descartes seems to see no need to offer definitions or explications of ‘conscientia’.

Evidently he assumed that his audience would understand this term without
explanation (although, as we will see, this proved not to be entirely true).8 This
carries a danger for us today: we are likely to begin with our own pre-theoretical
understanding of ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ and use these passages to work
out what he means by ‘thought’ from that. Using this interpretive strategy, many
commentators are led to the view that he is expanding the extension of ‘thought’
well beyond what we mean by ‘thought’ today, to include, for example, sense
data, sensations, mental images, etc.9
The opposite interpretive strategy might have something to recommend it:
perhaps we may arrive at an understanding of conscientia by beginning from
the hypothesis that he meant by ‘thought’ more or less what we mean today.
I suppose that, minimally, we think of thoughts as (i) intentional, that is, ‘about’
something, or having a ‘content’, and (ii) expressible in articulate propositions.
Clearly enough, sense data, sensations, and mental images and so on are not
thoughts, thus understood. We may be tempted to add to this characterization
of ‘thought’ ‘(iii) items which have a truth-value’; this won’t do for Descartes’s
conception, because operations of the will, being roughly equivalent to what
we call intentions, have a different ‘direction of fit’ from what we ordinarily call
thoughts. That Descartes classifies operations of the will as thoughts does indeed
represent a difference from contemporary usage, but not one that is normally
focused upon.
We may note passages [1] and [2] and their sequelae don’t quite say that the
operations of the senses and imagination are thoughts: they say that they are
thoughts insofar as we have conscientia of them.10 This suggests the following
interpretation: that to see something, to hear something, to fear something, to
feel pain in such and such a place, to imagine something . . ., are, for Descartes,
complex; to put it in an un-Cartesian idiom, the truth-conditions for the claim
that x (for example,) sees light (where x is a human being)11 include, but are
not exhausted by, the occurrence of a thought. Thus we could analyse ‘x sees
light’ something like this: x sees light if and only if (a) there is light which (b)
is stimulating x’s eyes, optic nerve, etc. such that (c) a certain thought (perhaps
naturally expressed as ‘I seem to see light’ (AT VII 29, CSM II 19)) is given
rise to in x.12 ( ‘I seem to see light’ might perhaps be analysed further, along
the following lines: ‘I (x) am entertaining the proposition that (a) and (b) hold
and am powerfully inclined to affirm that proposition’.13) I presume that similar
analyses could be offered for other operations of the senses.14
To a first approximation, the suggestion would then be that when we see light,
we have conscientia of (and only of) condition (c). This would make good sense
of the claim that the operations of the senses are thoughts insofar as we have
conscientia of them.
But how does this help us make sense of conscientia itself? Much of the
discussion in the literature centres on the question of whether conscientia is to
be understood as a ‘higher-order thought’ or as a ‘same-order thought’. Bourdin,
the author of the Seventh Objections, claimed to understand Descartes in the
first way: as holding that ‘when you think, you know and consider that you
are thinking (and this is really what it is to be conscious and to have conscious
awareness of some activity)’ (AT VII 533-4, CSM II 364); this interpretation
Descartes describes as ‘deluded’ (AT VII 559, CSM II 382). The position
ascribed to Descartes by Bourdin is untenable, as Descartes clearly recognizes if
conscientia is a HOT and if we have conscientia of every thought (including the
higher-order ones), then we will end up in an infinite regress.15
This observation might lead us to the following view: that conscientia is to
be understood simply as the power of the soul to reflect on its own operations.16
This has the obvious advantage that it does not construe conscientia as a higher-
order thought; reflection – the exercise of conscientia construed as a power
or disposition – is a HOT, but one can think without reflecting, so there is no
regress.
This proposal however cannot be quite right, for reasons that come out in
Descartes’s exchange with Arnauld in the Fourth Objections and Replies:
Arnauld asserts that ‘the mind of an infant in its mother’s womb has the power
of thought, but is not aware of it’ (AT VII 214, CSM II 150), to which Descartes
replies that ‘we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware at the very
moment when it is in us’, going on to suggest that the infant too is ‘immediately
aware of its thoughts’ but ‘does not remember them afterwards’ (AT VII 246,
CSM II 171-2). This does not sit easily with the above proposal that conscientia
is nothing but a power to reflect, although there is, I will suggest, still an essential
link between conscientia and reflection.
Another possibility is that Descartes sees conscientia as a same-order thought

rather than a HOT.17 Direct support for this might come from Descartes himself:
‘The initial thought by means of which we become aware of something does not
differ from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we were
aware of it’ (AT VII 559, CSM II 382).18 This is sometimes understood as saying
that every thought has two objects, one of which is whatever the thought is about,
and the other of which is the thought itself. Sometimes the first object is called
the ‘primary object’, the second the ‘secondary object’.19
I confess to finding this difficult to make sense of, and want to suggest
another possibility (which may, for all I know, be what the two-objects view is
attempting to get at).On this view, conscientia is neither a higher-order nor a
same-order thought: it is not a thought at all. Rather, it is a kind of ‘background’
or ‘implicit’ awareness that we – necessarily – have of our thoughts, which
is closely tied to the power of reflection, in the following sense: to make that
background awareness explicit, to ‘foreground’ the thought itself (rather than
what the thought is about), is to reflect. The resultant reflection is a thought and
indeed a HOT (We might need to add that only as we become adults are we
able to exercise the power of reflection, bearing in mind Descartes’s distinction
between ‘direct’ and ‘reflective’ thoughts, the thoughts of infants being direct
(AT VII 220-1, CSMK III 357).)20
What lies behind this suggestion is Sartre’s distinction between positional
and non-positional conscientia (1986 (1943): xxviii–xxx). We can make
some intuitive sense of this distinction with the following analogy. If, as the
phenomenologists (following the Gestalt psychologists) claim, every perception
is structured into figure and background,21 to be perceptually aware of the figure
is (inter alia) to be aware of the background, but the awareness of the figure
is explicit, whereas the awareness of the background is not; it can be made
explicit by a shift of perceptual attention. (It would be strange to say that every
perception has two objects: the figure and the background. The figure is the
object of the perceptual act, but the background is an inextricable part of the
whole perceptual experience and can become the object of another perceptual
act via a shift of attention.) In like manner, for Descartes, to think one sees light
(to seem to see light) is (inter alia) to be conscius of thinking that one sees light;
one’s conscientia of thinking one sees light is not a thought, but reflection, which
is simply the making-explicit of the conscientia, is one. We might, following
Sartre (1986 (1943): xxx), prefer to write ‘conscientia of ’ as ‘conscientia (of)’, to
remind ourselves of the point that conscientia ‘of ’ this or that thought does not
have the thought as its object.22
Thus conscientia can be understood as the ‘background awareness’ (of),

in the case under discussion, what we earlier called condition (c), that is, the
thought (e.g. that one sees light) which forms an essential part of the operations
of the senses and imagination in human beings.
Finally, I want to suggest that reflection, which is the making-explicit of
conscientia, can yield knowledge of the operations of the senses and imagination.
Thus the claim is not that conscientia is a kind of knowledge, but that it is
internally related to (at least) this particular class of knowledge. Let me begin
with an easy case of this, before introducing complications. We know that
for Descartes ‘I seem to see light’ is immune to hyperbolic doubt. This is the
burden of the paragraph which follows our passage [3]: ‘Are not all these things
[‘I seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed’] just as true as the fact that I exist,
even if I am asleep all the time, and even if he who created me is doing all he
can to deceive me?’, (AT VII 28-9, CSM II 19, emphasis original). Thus ‘I seem
to see light’ is ‘indubitable’, as long as we understand this term as expressing,
not a psychological incapacity, but the idea that it cannot be called into doubt,
that is, that no reasons can be given to doubt it.23 I take it that this amounts
to knowledge.24 Thus if I make that (of) which I have conscientia (when I see
light) explicit (through reflection), the resultant thought is indubitable and thus
amounts to knowledge.
Now for the complications: there are obstacles to the reflection just described.
We know already that the operations of the senses and imagination have complex
truth-conditions. On this basis, we might, following Descartes, see propositions
such as ‘I see light’ as, in a sense, ambiguous: there is a wide sense, according to
which ‘I see light’ expresses conditions (a)–(c), and a restricted sense (AT VII 29,
CSM II 19), in which it expresses only condition (c), that is, ‘I seem to see light’.
We normally (indeed naturally, i.e., because of our nature as union of mind and
body) fail to distinguish (make a distinction between) the two meanings. (This
is a way of understanding Descartes’s claim that the operations of the senses and
imagination are ‘confused thoughts’ (e.g. AT VII 81, CSM II 56), bearing in mind
that ‘distinct’ is the Cartesian opposite of ‘confused’.) 25
We might on this basis say that when our conscientia (of) this confused
thought is made explicit (i.e. when we reflect), we (normally and naturally)
engage in what we may call ‘impure reflection’.26 It is impure precisely because
it does not distinguish between the wide and the restricted senses of ‘I see light’.
Much of the Meditations is devoted to the sort of intellectual work – we may
call this ‘purifying reflection’27 – required to unconfuse such confused thoughts.
Only when we have done so are we in a position to engage in what we may
call ‘pure reflection’:28 our reflection then makes explicit our conscientia of a
thought (‘I see light’ in the restricted sense, i.e. ‘I seem to see light’) which is now
carefully distinguished from the thought with which it was formerly confused
(‘I see light’ in the wide sense). And it is this thought, not ‘I see light’ in the
wide sense, which is immune to hyperbolic doubt. If we fail to distinguish these
two senses of ‘I see light’, we are liable to fall into error: we, through habit or in
our eagerness to find truth, may take it that ‘I see light’ in the wide sense is as
indubitable as ‘I see light’ in the narrow sense: that it is as certain that there is
light, and that my eyes are being stimulated by light, as it is that I seem to see
light.
Thus pure reflection yields (indubitable) knowledge of the operations of the
senses and imagination, insofar as these operations are thoughts. Conscientia is
not itself a form of knowledge;29 nonetheless, it is internally related to something
(namely pure reflection) which does yield knowledge of this limited class.30
2 Conscientia and the operations of the will
I will be suggesting that the picture of conscientia painted in the previous section
can, when applied to the operations of the will (as opposed to those of the senses
and imagination) and with a few modifications, be understood as closely related
to conscience. I will suggest that conscience may itself be understood as a type of
knowledge, in particular knowledge of one’s own actions; once again, the claim
is not that conscientia is such knowledge, but that there is an internal relation
between the two.
The operations of the will, as they figure in the Meditations, seem at first sight
to be limited to affirming and denying.31 Passage [3], however, says of a thinking
thing not just that it affirms and denies but also that it ‘is willing’ and ‘is unwilling’
(AT VII 28, CSM II 19). Perhaps these terms might take us closer to what we
ordinarily think of as actions. (Affirming and denying may, of course, be called
actions; but actions as we ordinarily think of them involve body movements,
and actions thus understood – as most parallel to operations of the senses and
imagination, insofar as they can only occur in a union of mind and body – will
be the focus here.) I take it that an action is, by definition, intentional,32 and that
possibly these terms ‘willing’ and ‘unwilling’ are pointing us in the direction of
intentionality in this sense.
Descartes says very little about actions; one passage, however, might get
us started. Consider something Descartes said in response to an objection by
Gassendi: ‘I may not . . . make the inference “I am walking, therefore I exist”,

except insofar as the awareness of walking is a thought’ (AT VII 353, CSM II
244). Note that ‘awareness [conscientia] of walking’ here means conscientia in
the sense earlier called C1, not C2: it means something like ‘seeming to walk’.
This might suggest that we could treat ‘x is walking’ in parallel fashion to our
earlier treatment of ‘x sees light’: perhaps we could say that the truth-conditions
for the claim that x is walking (where x is a human being)33 are complex, like
those of ‘x sees light’. We might be tempted by something more or less like the
following analysis: ‘x walks’ is true if and only if (a) there is a surface against
which x’s feet push, (b) such pushing is caused by movements of various nerves,
muscles and limbs, such that x’s body is propelled forward, and such that (c)
a certain thought is given rise to (perhaps naturally expressed as ‘I seem to be
walking’, cashed out in parallel fashion to ‘I seem to see light’).
This, however, doesn’t capture the sense in which walking is an action, that
is, intentional: It treats it as if it is some occurrence which is simply perceived.
A better analysis might make the thought in condition (c), not ‘I seem to be
walking’, but something like ‘I am trying to walk’, possibly roughly cashable-out
as ‘I (x) intend that the other truth-conditions for “x is walking” hold’ (where
this gives rise to those other conditions, rather than being given rise to by them,
so as to capture the opposite direction of fit).34 This would begin to make sense
of the idea that the operations of the will – including, strange as it may sound,
actions such as walking – are thoughts insofar as we have conscientia of them.
Let us take our previous discussion of conscientia and reflection for granted
here. Conscientia (of) the operations of the will is neither a HOT nor a same-
order thought; rather, it names the kind of ‘background awareness’ we have of
our own thoughts (in this case, our intentions). To try to walk is (inter alia) to
be conscius (of) one’s trying to walk; one’s conscientia (of) so trying is not a
thought, but can give rise to one through reflection.
Finally, reflection, the making-explicit of conscientia, can – with an important
caveat – yield indubitable knowledge of the operations of the will. The caveat is,
once again, that the reflection in question be ‘pure’. It is through our exploration
of this that connections between conscientia and conscience will begin to look
more plausible.
Although this is not a move which Descartes makes, we might argue that
‘I am walking’ is in a certain sense ambiguous, just as ‘I see light’ is. In the
wide sense, ‘I am walking’ expresses the parallel conditions (a)–(c); in the
restricted sense, it expresses only condition (c), that is, ‘I am trying to walk’.
Again, Descartes never explicitly claims that operations of the will are confused
thoughts, but we can suggest on his behalf that they are, in that we normally
(and naturally) fail to distinguish the two meanings. Hence when we reflect on
the operations of the will, we normally engage in impure reflection; the sort
of purifying reflection sketched here enables us to unconfuse these thoughts
so that we can engage in pure reflection. As with the operations of the senses
and imagination, we can see an epistemological case for making the distinction
between a wide and a narrow sense of ‘I am walking’. If the demon is deceiving
me that there is an external world and that I have a body, then I am not walking
in the wide sense, but it will still be the case that I am walking in the narrow
sense, that is, trying to walk.
What, though, has all this to do with conscience? The term ‘conscience’
has itself been understood in multiple ways.35 For the purposes of making
sense of Descartes’s use of ‘conscientia’, we might link it to a tradition (visible,
e.g. in Aquinas) which sees it as consisting in two kinds of knowledge: first,
knowledge that one has performed or is performing this or that action, and
secondly, knowledge of the moral character of this action.36 What we have so far
is that pure reflection, the making-explicit of conscientia that we are acting ‘in
the narrow sense’, that is, trying to act, yields (indubitable) knowledge of one’s
actions, insofar as one can have such knowledge. Although what I have said so
far is somewhat speculative, it is a fairly natural extension of the account given in
the first section of conscientia (of) the operations of the senses and imagination.
But can it be connected to knowledge of the moral character of one’s actions?
Now, ‘x is walking’, all by itself, doesn’t look as though it has any particular
moral character; on the other hand, we seldom ‘just walk’. That is, the intention is
seldom just ‘to walk’, but, for example, to walk to the shop to get some Campari,
or to walk with a friend to enjoy the companionship and countryside, or to walk
away from the scene of an accident. If ‘walking away from the scene of an accident’
is, to use the jargon, the description under which my action is intentional, that
is, what I am trying to do, I may fail to reflect properly on this trying, and this
in one of several ways that go beyond the natural confusion described earlier.
In the first place, I may fail to treat the action in question as an action at all: in
effect, my reflection only gets me to ‘I (x) am entertaining the proposition that
the other truth-conditions for “x is walking” hold and am powerfully inclined to
affirm that proposition’. (One treats one’s action as if it were a mere happening.)
In the second place, I may fail to specify fully what it is that I intended to do: in
effect, my purifying reflection only gets me to ‘I (x) intend that the other truth-
conditions for “x is walking” hold and am powerfully inclined to affirm that they
do hold’. (One treats one’s action as if it were a morally neutral action.) Or I focus
on some description of the action other than that under which it was intentional
(I am walking towards the shop), and so on.
These kinds of reflective failures are commonplace, and one wants to say that
they are not mere failures but motivated, and indeed motivated by the conscientia
(of) what I am trying to do. This would be intelligible, although undoubtedly a
great deal more would need to be said, if we can suppose that in being conscius
(of) trying to walk away from the scene of an accident I am conscius (of) the
moral reprehensibility of what I am trying to do, and it is this that motivates me
to reflect so impurely. It remains the case that were I to reflect purely, I would
achieve indubitable knowledge of my action, scilicet of what I am trying to do,
and in so doing I would achieve knowledge of the action’s moral character. If this
link could be made, then knowledge of our own actions and knowledge of the
moral character of one’s actions are in fact not that far apart.37
These last remarks are both speculative and controversial; I hope at least to
have made it plausible that there is an internal relation between conscientia of
the operations of the will and knowledge of our own actions, even if someone
wants to resist the further argument for an internal relation between conscientia
of the operations of the will and knowledge of the moral character of our own
actions.
3 Some concluding remarks
I have tried to offer an interpretation of Descartes’s conception of conscientia,

or to be precise an interpretation of one of his conceptions of conscientia,
the one indicated in passages [1] and [2] quoted in the introduction. I have
deliberately focused on conscientia of the operations of the mind which arise
from the mind–body union. Hence I looked, first, at the operations of the senses
and imagination (although with a focus on the senses), and, secondly, on those
operations of the will which could be understood as intentions to perform a
body-involving action.
I argued, first, for a way to make sense of Descartes’s claim that the operations
of the senses, imagination and the will are thoughts insofar as we have conscientia
of them. I suggested that the truth-conditions of these operations (in human
beings) were, for Descartes, complex, involving things going on in the world,
things going on in the body and things going on in the mind. The latter, in
the case of operations of the senses, could be understood as ‘seemings’ (which
I attempted to cash out in a way that made it clear that to seem to see was to have
a thought); in the case of operations of the will, it could be understood as ‘tryings’

(which I again attempted to cash out in a way that made it clear that to try was to
have a thought, as long as we understand tryings as thoughts with the opposite
direction of fit from seemings). It is this – the seeming or the trying – of which
we have conscientia.
I argued, secondly, that conscientia is not to be understood either as a
higher-order or as a same-order thought (with, perhaps, a primary and a
secondary object, the secondary object being the thought itself). Rather, it can
be understood as a ‘background’ or ‘implicit’ awareness (of) the seeming or the
trying just identified.
Finally, the connection between conscientia and knowledge (including
knowledge of one’s own actions insofar as these involve tryings) went, I argued,
via reflection. Conscientia is not itself a form of knowledge. Rather, reflection
is a making-explicit of conscientia; reflection yields knowledge when, and
only when, it is ‘pure’, and it is pure (in relation to the operations of the senses,
imagination and will) when, and only when, the thinker has gone through the
sort of ‘purifying reflection’ that unconfuses the thoughts which are normally
and naturally confused. I suggested, very speculatively, that in the case of the
operations of the will, there were obstacles to pure reflection that went beyond
natural confusion, in order to try to make somewhat plausible a more robust
link between conscientia and conscience.
This is a complicated picture; some of the details may be contestable. However,
there are two conclusions which I think may be drawn.
First, a full appreciation of what Descartes understands by conscientia
requires some comprehension of his conception of a human being as well as
of his philosophical outlook more widely. We need (at least) to understand
what he means by ‘thought’, to recognize that the operations of the senses and
imagination as well as (I have suggested) the operations of the will depend on
the union of mind and body, to recognize that these operations normally and
naturally result in ‘confused thoughts’, and to appreciate that his main aim in the
Meditations is to give readers practice in unconfusing their confused thoughts.
And secondly, his conception of conscientia is a great distance from the
mythological picture painted by Ryle (according to whom Descartes holds that
‘If I think, hope, remember, will, regret, hear a noise, or feel a pain, I must,
ipso facto, know that I do so’, 1949: 158), a picture which continues to exert an
influence within contemporary philosophy of mind (e.g. Dennett 1991 with his
notion of the ‘Cartesian theater’), and which possibly even has some residual
traces in some serious Descartes scholars.38
Notes
1 It is noteworthy that the recently published, and highly authoritative, Cambridge

Descartes Lexicon (ed. Nolan 2016), with over 300 entries, does not contain an
entry on consciousness; indeed, the only references to consciousness in the entire
lexicon are in Alanen’s article ‘Thought’.
2 Hennig 2007 also uses ‘conscientia’ for roughly this purpose.
3 See Baker and Morris (1996: 100ff.) and the more recent and much more thorough
Hennig (2007). Hennig also sees a connection between conscientia and conscience,
though rather different from the one suggested here. I suspect that Descartes’s
conception of conscientia as sketched here might also shed light on Locke’s use of
the terms ‘conscious’ and ‘consciousness’ (principally in his discussion of innate
ideas and principles and in his discussion of personal identity), although I cannot
pursue this here. According to Fox (1982: 9), ‘outside of three minor uses of the
word itself . . . the earliest written use of the word “consciousness” in the English
language is by John Locke’.
4 In particular, I will suggest that Descartes’s term ‘conscientia’ (in the sense focused
on here) may be understood as something like Sartre’s ‘non-positional self-
consciousness’. It is confined to operations of the mind (AT VII 232, CSM II 162),
and possibly its capacities or powers (e.g. AT VII 49, CSM II 34, although AT VII
232, CSM II 162 seems to deny that).
5 Simmons (2012: 5) holds that passages supporting Radner’s C1 are taken out of
context in such readings and do not represent Descartes’s considered view; I find
Radner’s view more helpful, but for my purposes it doesn’t matter which view
we take.
6 Aquila (1988) suggests that Descartes was revolutionary in introducing the idea
of having conscientia of objects in the world; this may be true, but note that this
applies only to what Radner calls C1.
7 I am here understanding ‘operations of the will’ as specifically linked to (body-
involving) actions. Although Descartes says little about actions, there is a case to
be made for the claim that Descartes sees such operations of the will as, like the
operations of the senses and imagination, arising from the mind–body union. He
suggests that the faculties of imagination and sensory perception are modes of
thinking, but ones which only a mind united with a body has (AT VII 78, CSM II
54); it seems plausible to say that, similarly, body-involving actions are modes of
extension which only a body united with a mind has.
8 Cf. Jorgensen (2014: 4).
9 Baker and Morris (1993 and 1996: 13ff. and 30ff.) label this widespread
interpretation the ‘expansion thesis’ and argue against it.
10 Likewise the operations of the will, but this is for the next section.
11 In non-human animals, which also see, hear, feel pain, feel fear, imagine, and so
on, but not in the way that human beings do (cf., e.g. AT V 278, CSMK III 366),
the truth-conditions for their seeing something, hearing something, fearing
something, feeling pain in such and such a place, imagining something . . . would
arguably consist of all of these except the thought. In what follows I will take the
qualification ‘where x is a human being’ for granted.
12 I am using the slightly awkward phrase ‘give rise to’ to avoid ‘cause’, ‘occasion’, or
any other more specific term. The issues here are well beyond the scope of the
present chapter. However, see for example Hoffman 2010 for a reminder that
Descartes’s conception of causation is not Humean, and see for example Skirry
2005 (esp. 109–11 and 167–8) for an argument that a proper conception of the
mind–body union obviates the need to speak of efficient causation.
13 ‘Powerful inclination’: cf. ‘great propensity to believe’ (AT VII 80, CSM II 55). Note
that this is a ‘non-phenomenological’ reading of ‘seems’, using ‘phenomenological’
in the way it is commonly understood by Anglo-American commentators on
Descartes. Seeming on this reading involves both the intellect (grasping the
proposition) and the will (being powerfully inclined to affirm the proposition).
14 Likewise the imagination, but space precludes treating that in detail.
15 Simmons (2012: 7 n. 23) reviews some of the history of this charge, as do
Coventry and Kriegel (2008: esp. sec. 4) in connection with a parallel issue in
Locke interpretation, as well as indicating other objections to the ‘higher-order’
interpretation. Sartre too raises this objection (1986 (1943): xxviii); in fact
Descartes’s conscientia, I think, ends up far closer to Sartre’s ‘pre-reflective cogito’
than Sartre perhaps realized, cf. Wider 1997: 8ff.
16 Cf. Baker and Morris (1996: 107).
17 The terminology is adapted from Coventry and Kriegel’s discussion of Locke (2008:
224ff.; they speak of ‘higher-order’ and ‘same-order perception’); we can see this
interpretation of Descartes in, for example, Jorgensen (2014: 6). Aquila (1988: 544)
speaks of ‘a single, bi-directional state of consciousness’, which at first sight sounds
like the same view; but this seems to me not to make sense of Descartes’s claim that
conscientia in the relevant sense is, by definition, conscientia of thoughts.
18 Here the first and third occurrence of the ‘aware’ indicates C1, the second indicates C2.
19 See Radner (1988: 446). This terminology comes from Brentano: every conscious act
‘has a double object, a primary object and a secondary object’, where the secondary
object is the conscious act itself (quoted in Coventry and Kriegel 2008: 226).
20 Simmons (2012: 15ff.) makes a broadly similar distinction between ‘brute
consciousness’ and ‘reflective consciousness’; see also Radner (1988).
21 Merleau-Ponty (2002: 4).
22 Hennig (2007: 464–66) objects to interpreting conscientia as ‘awareness’; the notion
of awareness invoked here is a semi-technical one which may or may not entirely
concord with our ordinary notion (whatever that is, exactly), but seems to me not
to succumb to Hennig’s objections, although I cannot argue for this here.
23 It is sometimes suggested that knowledge of such thoughts is ‘incorrigible’
(e.g. Jorgensen 2014: 4); Broughton (2002: 137), rightly, says that they are
indubitable. She however understands ‘indubitability’ differently from either the
‘psychological incapacity’ tradition or in terms of ruling out hyperbolic doubt.
Rather, she argues that they are conditions for the possibility of the project of
methodological doubt.
24 That is, if all possible reasons for doubt have been eliminated, it would be frivolous
to suggest that it might for all that not be true (cf. AT VII 144-5, CSM II 103).
Some will object that this still does not amount to knowledge; there is no need for
me to treat these issues here, as they are general issues about Descartes’s conception
of knowledge.
25 See Morris (1995); see also Cunning (2010 passim), who helpfully diagnoses the
multiple sources of confusion. Simmons (2012: 17) makes a broadly parallel point,
but understands ‘confusion’ very differently from me or Cunning. See also Hennig
(2007:460).
26 Sartre (1986): 155ff.
27 Sartre (1986): 581.
28 Sartre (1986): 155ff.
29 Cf. Radner (1988: 447).
30 Cf. Simmons (2012: 16).
31 This is the role which they play in M4; and of course affirmations and denials can
be held to come under the scope of conscience as well, although that is not where I
want to put the main emphasis here.
32 This view is shared by many philosophers, including many Anglo-American
philosophers of mind, and is also explicit in Sartre (1986: 433).
33 In non-human animals, which also walk, etc., the truth-conditions for their
walking would also arguably consist of all of these except the thought.
34 This is not exactly our ordinary use of ‘trying’ (any more than the ‘seeming’ which
figured in the analysis of operations of the senses was our ordinary use of ‘seeming’,
as Austin (1962) famously demonstrated). We might compare it to Hornsby’s
conception (most recently, 2010); she argues for the ‘ubiquity’ of trying, that is,
every action involves a trying. She goes further in a way that need not concern
us here (she argues that every action is a trying, although not every trying is an
action), and she has nothing that quite corresponds to the ‘powerful inclination to
affirm’ expressed in the present conception.
35 Guibilini (2016) presents a ‘conceptual map’ (2016: 14) of some of these uses. See ,
for example, Hennig (2007: 474ff). for a more historical account.
36 See Guibilini (2016: 4–6), Hennig (2007: 476).
37 A fuller discussion of this claim would bring in Descartes’s conception of freedom

of the will as well as his doctrine of the passions. These are some of the directions
which Davenport (2006) explores.
38 See Baker and Morris (1996: 18–20) for an outline of some of the main features all
too often ascribed to so-called Cartesian introspection.
4 References
Alanen, L. (2016). ‘Thought’, in Nolan, ed., The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon,

Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 712–17.
Aquila, R. E. (1988). ‘The Cartesian and a certain “poetic” notion of consciousness’,
Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (4), 542–62.
Austin, J. L. (1962). Sense and Sensibility, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Baker, G. P., and K. J. Morris (1993). ‘Descartes unLocked’. British Journal for the History
of Philosophy, 1 (1), 5–28.
Baker, G. P., and K. J. Morris (1996). Descartes’ Dualism, London: Routledge.
Broughton, J. (2002). Descartes’s Method of Doubt. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press.
Coventry, A., and U. Kriegel (2008). ‘Locke on consciousness’, History of Philosophy
Quarterly, 25 (3), 221–42.
Cunning, D. (2010). Argument and Persuasion in Descartes’Meditations, Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.
Davenport, A. A. (2006). Descartes’s Theory of Action, Leiden: Brill Academic
Publishers.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Fox, C. (1982). ‘Locke and the Scriblerians: The discussion of identity in the early
eighteenth century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16 (1), 1–25.
Guibilini, A. (2016). ‘Conscience’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online).
Hennig, B. (2007) ‘Cartesian Conscientia’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy,
15 (3), 455–84.
Hoffman, P. (2010). ‘Descartes’, in T. O’Connor and C. Sandis, eds., A Companion to the
Philosophy of Action, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 481–89.
Hornsby, J. (2010). ‘Trying to act’, in T. O’Connor and C. Sandis, eds., A Companion to
the Philosophy of Action, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell18–25.
Jorgensen, L. M. (2014). ‘Seventeen-century theories of consciousness’, Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online).
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception, translated by C. Smith,
London and NY: Routledge.
Morris, K. (1995). ‘Intermingling and confusion’, International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, 3 (2), 290–306.
Nolan, L., ed. (2016). The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, Cambridge and NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Radner, D. (1988). ‘Thought and consciousness in Descartes’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 26, 439–52.
Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson & Co.
Sartre, J.-P. (1986 (1943)). Being and Nothingness, translated by H. E. Barnes, London:
Routledge.
Simmons, A. (2012). ‘Cartesian consciousness reconsidered’. Philosophers’ Imprint,
12 (2), 1–21.
Skirry, J. (2005). Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, London and New
York: Thoemmes-Continuum.
Wider, K. V. (1997). The Bodily Nature of Consciousness, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
3
Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept

of Consciousness
Liliana Albertazzi
1 Introduction
Brentano was both a classic proponent and a subverter of the Western

philosophical tradition. The theoretical and implicitly experimental potential
of his Psychologies (Brentano 1971, 1981a, 1995a, b) has only been partially
explained in the secondary literature and commentary on his work. Drawing
on Aristotelian origins, in fact, Brentano’s ideas gave rise to the outstanding
tradition of experimental inquiry which culminated in Gestalt Psychology
(Benussi 1913, 1914; Ehrenfels 1890; Koffka 1935; Köhler 1969, 1929; Meinong
1899, 1910; Stumpf 1883; Wertheimer 1923. See Albertazzi 2013a, b; Albertazzi,
Jacquette and Poli 2001; Ihde 1986; Wagemans 2015). The principles of
Gestalt organization have never been disputed, and they have received further
development in the neurosciences (Hess, Beaudot and Mullen 2001; Kovács,
Fehér and Julesz 1998; Kovács and Julesz 1993; Shapiro and Todorovic 2014;
Spillmann and Ehrenstein 2004; Wagemans et al. 2012), although they have
been mainly considered in terms of low-level vision. This implies the use of
methodologies and models which would ensure their veridical explanation. One
may reasonably ask whether this is what Brentano really had in mind.
Brentano has often been reductively and idiosyncratically classified as a
forerunner of Husserlian phenomenology (Spiegelberg 1982) or a precursor
of analytic philosophy (Smith 1994), or more simply as ‘the theoretician of
intentionality’, but this classification occurs almost always without knowledge
of the many dimensions of an ‘intentional reference’ (intentionale Beziehung).
Brentano’s ideas on the phenomena of consciousness (Bewusstseins Phänomene) –
which formed the core of his thought – were never speculative. With his
profound knowledge of the nascent scientific psychology of his time, Brentano
was one of the first to claim the legitimacy of phenomenological analysis in the
study of consciousness (Brentano 1995a). In fact, he advanced a pioneering
and architectural theory of consciousness derived from his studies of Aristotle
(Aristotle 1986; Brentano 1977), based on the idea that we perceive and are
conscious of qualitative forms, not of stimuli or (neuro)physiological correlates.
In so doing, Brentano claimed the independence of a science of psychic
phenomena per se, and he specified the difference between the subject, method
and epistemic value of psychological science and psychophysics, physiology
(Brentano 1995a, 1971, 1981b) and Newtonian physics. His distinctions in this
regard are still valid today, notwithstanding the enormous computational and
quantitative development of those sciences in recent decades of experimental
research. Analysis, however brief, of the components of what Brentano termed
a whole of consciousness may suffice to outline the theory and requirements
that still today entail the kind of systematic and experimental analysis which
he advocated. To this end, I shall show that his ideas are not comparable to
contemporary theories of mind, and that, on the contrary, they may constitute
a veritable turning point in the scientific analysis of consciousness – as,
more generally, they are beginning to be recognized in studies on perception
(Albertazzi 2013; Wagemans 2015).
There is a large body of literature on Brentano, to which I myself have
contributed (Albertazzi 2005, 2007, 2015a), so that I need only refer to the
extensive bibliography available.
2 The externalism/internalism divide
The current debate on a science of consciousness dates back to the beginning of

the 1990s, but there does not yet exist an overall theoretical framework on which
to anchor the idea of consciousness itself. It also seems that current empirical
research is unable to solve the philosophical problem because of the lack of proper
observables to be verified, which is to say, definition of and agreement on what a
phenomenon of consciousness is supposed to be. More or less, what is verified in
laboratories and/or through computational models is psychophysical response/
judgement (a behavioural output) to physical stimulus or a neural (physical)
correlate of the stimulus, or the synchronization of the activity of different neurons
in the cortex (Milner and Goodale 1995; Singer 1999; Pöppel and Logothetis 1986).
Within the framework of cognitive science, the notion of internalism (to
which Brentano is sometimes verbally linked) grew out of the science of artificial
Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept of Consciousness 29
intelligence; it represents the mind as an internal mechanism (like a computer)

for the algorithmic elaboration, transformation and representation of stimuli
(metrical cues) originating in a transcendent reality (usually identified with
classical mechanics). The development of neuroscience essentially changed the
reference from one kind of computer to another (the brain) that supposedly acts
primarily according to inferential-probabilistic principles rather than logical-
deductive ones. Aside from the specific differences in research and instruments
of investigation, in both cases the internalism of the mind refers to an algorithmic
mechanism and is analysed primarily according to computational methods.
However, doubts on the computer nature of the brain have been raised because
of statistical variations on movement and brain cells death (Edelman 2004), and
because not necessarily mental functions have to be algorithmic (Penrose 1989).
In recent years, proposals in favour of an embodied or situated consciousness
have entered the debate. Not all of them embrace the same idea of reality or even
the same idea of representation, which ranges from internalist hypotheses (the
enactive perception as autopoiesis of Maturana and Varela (1980)) to externalist
ones (O’Reagan and Noë 2001, 2004) that usually end in the idea of an extended
mind (Clark 1992). Most interestingly, nearly all the versions of embodied
cognition, whether internalist or externalist, reduce the mind to the brain and/or
to a psychophysical body. They consequently share a fundamental reductionist
element that uses classical physics or biology as the primary ontological reference
points for the explanation of conscious phenomena. These theories address
the issue of mind and consciousness in quantitative terms of stimuli and the
processing of information contained within the stimuli according to the classic
mathematical conception of Shannon and Weaver (1949/1998). Embodied and
enactive approaches can be powerful methodological tools in behavioural and
neurophysiological investigations; but their ultimate reliance on sensorimotor
contingencies for the construction of mental content inevitably gives them a
naïve realist flavour (see Vishwanath 2005. More on this topic in Albertazzi, van
Tonder and Vishwanath 2010, § 4).
Other proposals are instead still couched in terms of inferences or symbolic-
conceptual interpretations of stimuli (Gregory 1986, 2009; Mack and Rock 1998;
Rock 1983), or of social communication activities such as language (Dennett
1991; Searle 1980, 1992), avoiding the fact and the explanation of an evident
and direct perception of meaningful appearances in daily life that are in principle
language-independent.
In all theories, past experience plays a primary role in the recognition of
objects as an unconscious process, or in terms of instances of the corresponding
concept based on characterizations or interpretations of a linguistic/cognitive

nature, be they mental images (Jackendoff 1987, 1992) or pictures in the sense
of computational vision theory (Marr 1982), presented as digital images. What
remains unexplained is the nature of subjective conscious phenomena per se.
Currently, theories of subjective experience can be grouped into three
categories: (i) some explain qualitative experiences directly in terms of physical
or primary properties (e.g. colorimetry explains perception of the colour
‘red’ in terms of radiation (Brainard 1995)); (ii) others do so in terms of a
psychophysical (Boynton 1979) or physiological process (e.g. neurophysiology
explains perception of the colour ‘red’ in terms of neuronal correlates); (iii) yet
others do so in terms of the phenomena of consciousness (subjective experience
of the colour ‘red’) which arise on the material basis of neural correlates. The first
two explanations are somewhat self-consistent in that their frame of reference
is physics and/or neurophysiology. They consequently reduce the phenomena of
consciousness to physical phenomena. The third explanation is more problematic
because it is usually unable to explain the presumed categorial difference among
the physical stimulus, its chemical–electrical (therefore still physical) processing
in the cortical pathways and the qualitative nature claimed for the phenomena
of consciousness (the ‘red’ subjectively experienced in seeing). Also in this case,
it is assumed that perception begins with retrieval of information of a physical
type (based on an inverse optics, for example, Pizlo 2001), and that it consists
of biological (physical) changes occurring in the organism that can be modelled
using Bayesian and standard regulation methods. Conscious perceiving
thus falls within one of the two previous categories, even when it explains its
difference from them by appealing to syntactic functions of the ‘reading’ of
neurophysiological data by a not further defined ‘mind’ (Eccles 1990). In fact,
there is nothing semantic, qualitative or conscious about algorithmic syntax.
It therefore seems that contemporary theories of consciousness are uniformly
at risk when they claim to ‘explain’ the meaning of our conscious experiences
and their nature. One wonders what error has caused this deadlock and whether
Brentano’s neo-Aristotelian theory might be a viable alternative to them.
3 The Aristotelian legacy
As well known, in De Anima, Aristotle defines the psyche as the inner principle
of an animated substance, by which he intends a living and/or a biological
organism. Psyche means a life, the life of a living organism (the indefinite article
Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept of Consciousness 31
being not present in Greek). In the Aristotelian framework, psychology is part

of the science of nature, as is physics. One should not forget that Avicenna
listed the Aristotelian book of Psychology as the sixth book of the things of
nature, and that Aristotle was an unbiased realist, that he never questioned the
existence of an external world. Nor should one forget that, most interestingly,
Aristotelian physics is eminently qualitative (Aristotle 1980). One might speak
of the Aristotelian doctrine in terms of perceptual realism; or better, describe
Aristotle as a realist in regard to sensible qualities. The issue is whether in his
framework, too, physiological processes have to be understood as the material
basis for conscious perceiving, linearly (mathematically) derived from physical
stimuli external to the perceiver, and defined in modern terms as primary
qualities that are essentially, metric features.
In the Aristotelian view, however, things themselves have sensible qualities.
Things are not merely primary qualities as we conceive them in light of the
Galilean definition, as objective properties definable in terms of metrical cues
(Galileo 1623/1957). Vice versa, in Aristotle it is the secondary qualities, called
sensibles (aisthêta) (colours, tastes, smells, sounds), that qualify the objects
which we perceive in terms of smells, colours, sounds, tactile impressions, etc.
(see also Hume 1975).
The assumption that primary qualities understood in the Galilean sense as
metric cues are responsible for a general infrastructure of reality is not to be
found either in Aristotelian physics or in Aristotelian psychology; nor, moreover,
does it appear in Brentano’s empirical and descriptive psychology.
According to Aristotle, access to the external world given by our senses occurs
in terms of couples of contraries, perceivable attributes such as warm and cold,
hard and soft, high and low, rough and smooth and the like. The sensible matter
of the things that we perceive (sensibles), in fact, is due to the four elements (earth,
water, air and fire) characterized by couples of contraries forming four ontological
combinations: earth is dry and cold, water is cold and moist, air is moist and
warm, fire is warm and dry. Every sensible is organized according to couples
of contraries: colours themselves, for example, can be shown to be arranged in
terms of hot and dry and cold and moist (Albertazzi, Koenderink and van Doorn
2015). Elements themselves undergo transformations and combinations: for
example, air and water can transform into each other, which accounts for the
fact that, for example, metal can be liquified (aqueous) and still be solid (earthy)
at standard temperatures. Aristotelian elements too are not to be understood in
terms of physical stuff. They are ontological types or principles to whose nature all
the other material substances approximate (as ‘more or less’, or in ‘pure or mixed
forms’), producing consciousness states similar to the qualities of the things in

nature. The continuous change and transformation of the matter of things into
different kinds (elements) can occur according to quality (as from blue to green,
from sweet to bitter, from treacly to acid) or intensity (from more to less, from
great to small). Here vocabulary is at issue because Aristotle is not speaking in
terms of Platonic ideas but of qualitative perceivable attributes or qualities of
matter shared by the different modalities and associated by an inner sense.
The cross-modal difference between perceiving something as yellow and
sweet (honey) and something else as yellow and bitter (gall) is not an idea we
obtain from the single senses. Aristotle distinguishes among proper sensibles
(the qualities perceived by individual senses, such as colour, sound or taste);
common sensibles (what is common to more than one sense, such as being still
or in motion); and sensibles per accidens (the perception of substances, for
example a person, through his or her accidents such as being a white and tall
thing). Briefly, what we call perceptive experiences in the broad sense, such as
tables, balls, trees, cherries, people and all others, in the Aristotelian framework
are individual substances perceived through their qualities and relations. We do
not perceive ‘stimuli’ as such. In the dynamic process of perceiving, the subject
actualizes any kind of potential material object (through its qualities), relatively
to the different senses, what gives rise to conscious psychic states.
In Aristotle both the perception of sensibles and self-awareness are due to the
proper sensible, defined as an inner sense directed towards the internal dynamics
of the sensitive part of the psyche (Aristotle 1986, II, 6, 418 a, 16. On this point
see also Brentano 1977, Part III, b, c.62). Analytically, as the active principle of
sensation, it is the inner sense that enables the perception and the distinction
of differences among the objects of different senses (a sound, colour, tactile
perception); the cross-dimensional perception and distinction of differences
among the objects of each sense (such as seeing something as red and round);
the cross-modal association of smooth things with sweet, warm, dry and soft
and vice versa sharp-angled things with sour, wet and hard, because of the
reciprocal overlapping between the couples of contraries. Most of all, it allows
self-consciousness. Briefly, inner sense, defined as the active corporeal quality,
acts as the medium for any other sensation, and is responsible for the fact
that perceived objects are conscious. The point would be further specified by
Brentano in his denial that any psychic phenomenon as such may be unconscious
(Brentano 1995a).
In the ancient Aristotelian framework – obviously very distant from the rise
of psychology as an experimental discipline – common sense is also what makes
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THE END
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Full Ebook of The Bloomsbury Companion To The Philosophy of Consciousness 1St Edition Dale Jacquette Online PDF All Chapter

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The Bloomsbury Companion to the

Philosophy of Consciousness 1st

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50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2018

© Dale Jacquette, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-2901-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Think of consciousness as a territory just opening its settlement and

1 Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness Dale Jacquette 1

Part 1 Historical Development

2 The Hard Problem of Understanding Descartes on

Part 2 Groundbreaking Concepts of Consciousness

6 Consciousness, Representation and the Hard Problem Keith Lehrer 93

Part 3 Metaphilosophy of Consciousness Studies

11 Understanding Consciousness by Building It Michael Graziano

Part 4 Mental Causation, Natural Law and Intentionality of

15 Toward Axiomatizing Consciousness Selmer Bringsjord,

20 Annotated Bibliography 413

Liliana Albertazzi Michael Graziano

Keith Lehrer Florida State University

The chapters collected in this book investigate philosophical aspects, problems

Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness

The philosophy of consciousness is a relatively new concentration of interest

explain the concept, possibility, structure or phenomenological contents of

Kripke’s reasoning against the background of their broader implications for

for an Attributive-Dynamic (AD) model of consciousness explains streaming

Then follows Part V, Resources, with further annotated readings, electronic

A man’s thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison

The Hard Problem of Understanding

Introduction: Conscientia and thought

[2] By the term ‘thought’, I understand everything which we are aware of as

1 Conscientia and the operations of the senses and

Descartes seems to see no need to offer definitions or explications of ‘conscientia’.

Another possibility is that Descartes sees conscientia as a same-order thought

Thus conscientia can be understood as the ‘background awareness’ (of),

2 Conscientia and the operations of the will

Gassendi: ‘I may not . . . make the inference “I am walking, therefore I exist”,

3 Some concluding remarks

I have tried to offer an interpretation of Descartes’s conception of conscientia,

a thought); in the case of operations of the will, it could be understood as ‘tryings’

1 It is noteworthy that the recently published, and highly authoritative, Cambridge

37 A fuller discussion of this claim would bring in Descartes’s conception of freedom

Alanen, L. (2016). ‘Thought’, in Nolan, ed., The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon,

Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept

Brentano was both a classic proponent and a subverter of the Western

2 The externalism/internalism divide

The current debate on a science of consciousness dates back to the beginning of

intelligence; it represents the mind as an internal mechanism (like a computer)

concept based on characterizations or interpretations of a linguistic/cognitive

1 Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness Dale Jacquette 1

6 Consciousness, Representation and the Hard Problem Keith Lehrer 93

20 Annotated Bibliography 413