Paul Livingston: Presentation and the Ontology of Consciousness
Duration: 46 mins 26 secs
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| Description: |
This a talk from 'Intentionality: New Directions', a workshop on intentionality, the mind’s capacity to represent the world. The workshop took place at Peterhouse, Cambridge, 21-23 March 2017, as part of the New Directions in the Study of the Mind project, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Image: Compass Study, Calsidyrose. |
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| Created: | 2017-04-08 21:38 |
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| Collection: | Intentionality: New Directions |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Faculty of Philosophy |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Distribution: |
World
(downloadable)
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| Explicit content: | No |
| Abstract: | In this paper, I consider some potential implications for the metaphysics and ontology of consciousness of an idea that is crucial to many central developments of the phenomenological tradition beginning with Brentano and Husserl. This is the idea of an essential link between consciousness and presentation, such that we can understand key aspects of the metaphysics of consciousness by understanding conscious states as having, essentially, a presentational character. If set in the context of recent modal and two-dimensional arguments for the falsity or limitations of physicalism, consideration of the presentational character of consciousness motivates a novel kind of ontological option for its placement in the world. This option vindicates the irreducibility of consciousness (in one sense of “irreducible”) to description or explanation in terms only of physical facts, and clarifies this irreducibility as resulting ultimately from broadly modal/semantic features of the presentation and individuation of entities across possible worlds. At the same time, it does not thereby require or invite anything like a substance or property dualism, since the features of consciousness that make for its irreducibility can also (as I shall argue) be accounted for by means of a global monism of substances and properties. |
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