This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

This paper develops an adverbial theory of consciousness. Adverbialism is described and endorsed and defended from its near rival, an identity thesis in which conscious mental states are those that the mental subject self-knows immediately that he or she is "in". The paper develops an account of globally supported self-ascription to embed this neo-Brentanian view of experiencing consciously within a more general account of the relation between consciousness and self-knowledge. Following O'Shaughnessy, person level consciousness is explained as a feature of (...) the bundle of mental capacities characteristic of persons: person level consciousness involves a capacity holism. Drawing on Kant, it is argued that if a person is in a mental state intentionally directed to an object then such a subject can "self token" such knowledge. The content of that self-knoweldge supervenes on the possession of a global set of capacities, and this capacity for self-ascription depends on the fact that our experience has a perspectival character with, as it were, nothing at the vanishing point of this perspective. The fact that one can attach the cogito to any one of one's representation shows a truth about the unity of the conscious life of a person that cannot be stated and this capacity is distinguished from self-conscious thinking about oneself. This approach is contrasted to Shoemaker's functionalist treatment of the self-tokening of conscious states and of "self-blindness". It is argued that to be fully consistent, Shoemaker has to abandon the claim that introspectionism is guilty of a self-scanning model or rational control as he seems committed to that model too. (shrink)

It is argued that reasonable partiality allows an agent to attach value to particular objects of attachment via recognition of the value of the holding of that relation between agent and object. The reasonableness of partiality is ensured by a background context set by the agent's virtues, notably justice. It is argued that reasonable partiality is the only view that is compatible with our best account of the nature of self-knowledge. That account rules out any instrumental relationship between moral demands (...) and moral character, but that familiar claim is given an unfamiliar explanation. Instrumentality depends on a prior objectification of the self and it is that kind of objectification that, in the ethical case, represents a form of ethical evasion. Self-knowledge is transparent, incomplete and essentially connected with first person endorsement. The transparency condition is that knowledge of one's state of mind is "taken" transparently to its object. More specifically, ethical transparency is the feature that my virtues do not exhibit themselves to me in self-knowledge, but take me transparently to the way in which they saliently represent the world as containing evaluative properties calling for various forms of response. It is concluded that reasonable partiality grounded in the nature of the virtues is the only reflective account of morality compatible with the most plausible account of the nature of self-knowledge. The demands of impartiality are incompatible with a condition of having a personal point of view, namely, that a self can stand in a non-alienated relation to itself via its capacity for self-knowledge. (shrink)

I claim that consciousness, just as thought or action, is only to be found at the personal level of explanation. Dennett's account is often taken to be at odds with this view, as it is seen as explicating consciousness in terms of sub-personal processes. Against this reading, and especially as it is developed by John McDowell, I argue that Dennett's work is best understood as maintaining a sharp personal/sub-personal distinction. To see this, however, we need to understand better what content (...) ascription at the sub-personal level actually means. When we do we can see how Dennett presents both a philosophical account of consciousness and informed empirical speculation on the nature of its sub-personal underpinnings. Consciousness is a product of certain capacities that are intelligible only at the personal level, capacities that are neither present at the sub-personal level of brain mechanism nor present in 'sub-persons', e.g. some, if not all, non-human animals. (shrink)