What Subjectivity Is Not

Topoi - Tập 36 - Trang 41-53 - 2014
Joseph Neisser1
1Department of Philosophy, Grinnell College, Grinnell, USA

Tóm tắt

An influential thesis in contemporary philosophy of mind is that subjectivity is best conceived as inner awareness of qualia. (Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, London, 2001) has argued that this unique subjective awareness generates a paradox which resists empirical explanation. On account of this “paradox of subjective duality,” Levine concludes that the hardest part of the hard problem of consciousness is to explain how anything like a subjective point of view could arise in the world. Against this, I argue that the nature of subjective thought is not correctly characterized as inner awareness, that a non-paradoxical approach to the first-person perspective is available, and that the problem about subjectivity should be distinguished from the perennial problem of qualia or phenomenal properties.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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