The correspondence between Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins of 1706–8, while not well known, is a spectacularly good debate between a dualist and a materialist over the possibility of giving a materialist account of consciousness and personal identity. This article puts the Clarke Collins Correspondence in a broader context in which it can be better appreciated, noting that it is really a debate between John Locke and Anthony Collins on one hand, and Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler on the other. (...) Anthony Collins argues on behalf of John Locke's claim that it would be as easy for God to superadd the power of thinking to matter as for him to connect a soul to a body. Locke did not believe that matter could naturally produce thought or consciousness, but it was in God's power to make matter think. To defend Locke's claim Collins must defend the claim that there are emergent properties in the world – properties of a whole that are not possessed by the parts. Collins also defends a materialist version of Locke's account of personal identity against a variety of charges. Because the topics of debate in the correspondence are of such great interest to us, it deserves to be rescued from the neglect into which it fell and from which intellectual historians and philosophers have only recently and partially removed it. (shrink)

Sometimes we love and hate the same thing at the same time. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)—the maverick early modern materialist—appeals to this type of passionate conflict to argue that the mind is a material thing. When our passions conflict, the mind or reason conflicts with itself. From this Cavendish infers that the mind has parts and, therefore, is material. Cavendish says this argument is among the best proofs of the mind’s materiality. And yet, the existing scholarship on Cavendish lacks the kind (...) of detailed reconstruction required to evaluate this argument’s merits. In this paper, I provide just such a reconstruction. I also show that Cavendish’s argument is an effective intervention in her dispute with René Descartes and Henry More about the (im)materiality of the mind. (shrink)

Hermann Lotze argued that the fact that consciousness simultaneously “holds objects together as well as apart” such that they can be compared implies (a) that there is a simple thinker and (b) that consciousness is an ‘indivisible unity.’ I offer a reconstruction and evaluation of Lotze’s Argument from Comparison. I contend that it does not deliver (a) but makes a good case for (b). I will relate Lotze’s argument to the contemporary debate between “top-down” and “bottom-up” views of the unity (...) of consciousness and locate it in its historical context. (Kant and Herbart figure prominently here.). (shrink)

Co-Directors: Alexander Pruss & Tim O’Connor Committee: C. Stephen Evan’s, Todd Buras, -/- The current state of consciousness research is at an impasse. Neuroscience faces a variety of recalcitrant problems regarding the neurobiological binding together of states of consciousness. Philosophy faces the combination problem, that of holistically unifying phenomenal consciousness. In response, I argue that these problems all result from a naturalistic assumption that subjects of consciousness are built up out of distinct physical parts. I begin by developing a Husserlian (...) mereology of part-whole relations, which I apply to both an ontology of the holistic unity of the subjects of consciousness and the holistic unity of phenomenal consciousness itself. After a detailed analysis of the ontology and neuroscience of phenomenally unified consciousness, I argue against the three major naturalist views: physicalism, Russellian panpsychism, and emergentism. I develop various arguments demonstrating that these views each fail to account for the possibility of subjects of phenomenally unified consciousness. In the final chapter, I show how these arguments entail that the subject of phenomenal unity must be partless, must be a simple holistic unity. In turn, this provides a defense of substance dualism or at least something near enough. Given the widespread rejection of mind-body dualism, I answer certain neurological objections and conclude by sketching the details of an underexplored neo-Aristotelian form of substance dualism. I conclude that each of us, indeed every subject of phenomenally unified consciousness, is not made up of distinct parts. Not a brain. Not a body. Every embodied subject of phenomenally unified consciousness is a bodily soul. (shrink)

This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a long­standing intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: (...) what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference? (shrink)

The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such ‘between-subjects unity’. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of ‘experience-sharing’, in which the same token experience belongs to more (...) than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like. (shrink)