The Metaphysics of Consciousness

Basile, Pierfrancesco
Pauline Phemister is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include The Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (2006) and Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity and Corporeal Substances in the Philosophy of Leibniz (2005). She has published widely on topics in early modern philosophy, especially in the areas of metaphysics, ethics and mind-body relations.Kiverstein, Julian
Julian Kiverstein is a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. The author of a number of papers on consciousness, temporality and the self, he is also editing Heidegger and Cognitive Science (2010, with Michael Wheeler) and Decomposing the Will (2010, with Till Vierkant and Andy Clark).Phemister, Pauline
Pierfrancesco Basile teaches Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His publications include two books, Experience and Relations: An Examination of F. H. Bradley's Conception of Reality (1999) and Leibniz, Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation (2009), as well as several essays on issues in metaphysics, process thought, British idealism and early analytic philosophy.

What is consciousness? What is the place of consciousness in nature? These and related questions occupy a prominent place in contemporary studies in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, often involving complex interdisciplinary connections between philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, biology and cognitive neuroscience. At the same time, these questions play a fundamental role in the philosophies of great thinkers of the past such as, among others, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, William James and Edmund Husserl. This new collection of essays by leading contemporary philosophers of mind and historians of philosophy seeks to address these questions from both a systematic and a theoretical perspective and to create a new and fruitful forum for future discussion. In the attempt to do justice to the richness of our mental life, the volume features in-depth examinations not solely of mainstream physicalist doctrines, but also of largely neglected positions such as Cartesian dualism, idealism and panpsychism. What is consciousness? By bringing together leading historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers of mind to re-examine a broad range of inherited views, this new collection of essays addresses this and related questions from both a systematic and a theoretical perspective and seeks to create fruitful lines of future inquiry.

This new collection of essays brings together leading contemporary philosophers of mind to re-examine the key question: what is consciousness?

1. Consciousness: don't give up on the brain Kenneth Aizawa; 2. It must be true - but how can it be? Some remarks on panpsychism and mental composition Pierfrancesco Basile; 3. How to become unconscious Stephen Clark; 4. Time in consciousness, consciousness in time David Cockburn; 5. Phenomenal holism Barry Dainton; 6. Making sense of phenomenal unity: an intentionalist account of temporal experience Julian Kiverstein; 7. Sprigge's ontology of consciousness Leemon McHenry; 8. The representational vs. the relational view of visual experience Brian P. McLaughlin; 9. The road to substance dualism Geoffrey Madell; 10. Is there a metaphysics of consciousness without a phenomenology of consciousness? Some thoughts derived from Husserl's philosophical phenomenology Eduard Marbach; 11. Quality, thought and consciousness Howard Robinson; 12. Concessionary dualism and physicalism William Seager; 13. Fundamental singleness: how to turn the 2nd paralogism into a valid argument Galen Strawson.