About this topic
Summary The phenomenal concepts are supposed to be the first-person-specific concepts that we use to think about our own phenomenal experiences. Phenomenal concepts have mostly been discussed in relation with the debates surrounding physicalism, where certain theories of phenomenal concepts have been thought to provide an answer to conceivability arguments against physicalism. This is known as the phenomenal concept strategy.
Key works The phenomenal concept strategy was introduced in Loar 1990. It is also defended in Papineau 2002 and Tye 2003Chalmers 2004 offers a response. Chalmers 2003 offers a broader discussion of phenomenal concepts. 
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  1. Swamp Mary semantics: A case for physicalism without gaps.Pete Mandik - manuscript
    I argue for the superiority of non-gappy physicalism over gappy physicalism. While physicalists are united in denying an ontological gap between the phenomenal and the physical, the gappy affirm and the non-gappy deny a relevant epistemological gap. Central to my arguments will be contemplation of Swamp Mary, a being physically intrinsically similar to post-release Mary (a physically omniscient being who has experienced red) but has not herself (the Swamp being) experienced red. Swamp Mary has phenomenal knowledge of a phenomenal character (...)
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  2. Phenomenal Concepts and Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument.Martina Prinz & François-Igor Pris - manuscript
  3. The Rise and Fall of the Mind-Body Problem.Katalin Balog - forthcoming - In Corine Besson, Anandi Hattiangadi & Romina Padro (eds.), Meaning, Modality and Mind: Essays Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Naming and Necessity. Oxford University Press.
    In this paper, I examine the relationship between physicalism and property dualism in the light of the dialectic between anti-physicalist arguments and physicalist responses. Upon rehearsing the moves of each side, it is hard not to notice that there is a puzzling symmetry between dualist attacks on physicalism and physicalist replies. Each position can be developed in a way to defend itself from attacks from the other position, and it seems that there are neither a priori nor a posteriori grounds (...)
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  4. Whose Consciousness? Reflexivity and the Problem of Self-Knowledge.Christian Coseru - forthcoming - In Mark Siderits, Ching Keng & John Spackman (eds.), Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness Tradition and Dialogue. Leiden: pp. 121-153.
    If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...)
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  5. Phänomenale Begriffe.Martina Fürst - forthcoming - In Vera Hoffmann-Kolss & Nicole Rathgeb (eds.), Handbuch Philosophie des Geistes. Metzler. pp. 1-11..
    Viele unserer Bewusstseinszustände sind dadurch charakterisiert, dass es irgendwie für uns ist (Nagel 1974), in diesen Zuständen zu sein. In der Philosophie des Geistes werden derartige Zustände als ‚phänomenale Zustände‘ bezeichnet. ‚Phänomenale Begriffe‘ sind nun spezielle Begriffe, mittels derer wir uns auf phänomenale Zustände beziehen. Paradigmatische Beispiele für phänomenale Zustände, von denen wir einen phänomenalen Begriff besitzen können, sind das bewusste Erlebnis, die Farbe Blau zu sehen, den Klang einer Violine zu hören oder Schmerz zu fühlen. Zentral ist, dass sich (...)
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  6. Closing the Conceptual Gap in Epistemic Injustice.Martina Fürst - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1): 1-22..
    Miranda Fricker’s insightful work on epistemic injustice discusses two forms of epistemic injustice—testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the victim lacks the interpretative resources to make sense of her experience, and this lacuna can be traced down to a structural injustice. In this paper, I provide one model of how to fill the conceptual gap in hermeneutical injustice. First, I argue that the victims possess conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences, namely phenomenal concepts. Second, I (...)
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  7. What I am and what I am not: Destruktion of the mind-body problem.Javier A. Galadí - 2023 - Philosophies 8 (6):110.
    The German word Destruktion was used by Heidegger in the sense that philosophy should destroy some ontological concepts and the everyday meanings of certain words. Tradition allows the transmission of knowledge and sensations of continuity and connection with the past, but it must be critically evaluated so that it does not perpetuate certain prejudices. According to Heidegger, tradition transmits, but it also conceals. Tradition induces self-evidence and prevents us from accessing the origin of concepts. It makes us believe that we (...)
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  8. Suffering is bad.Louis Gularte - 2023 - Synthese 202 (6):1-28.
    Subtitle: "Experiential understanding and the impossibility of intrinsically valuing suffering." Suffering, I argue, is bad. This paper supports that claim by defending a somewhat bolder-sounding one: namely that if anyone—even a sadistic ‘amoralist’—fully understands the fact that someone else is suffering, then the only evaluative attitude they can possibly form towards the person’s suffering as such is that of being _intrinsically against_ it. I first argue that, necessarily, everyone is disposed to be intrinsically against their _own_ suffering experiences, holding fixed (...)
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  9. Knowing What It's Like.Andrew Y. Lee - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):187-209.
    David Lewis—famously—never tasted vegemite. Did he have any knowledge of what it's like to taste vegemite? Most say 'no'; I say 'yes'. I argue that knowledge of what it’s like varies along a spectrum from more exact to more approximate, and that phenomenal concepts vary along a spectrum in how precisely they characterize what it’s like to undergo their target experiences. This degreed picture contrasts with the standard all-or-nothing picture, where phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge lack any such degreed structure. (...)
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  10. Natural Mutation and Human Catalysis - Philosophy After the Big Bang Theory.Yang I. Pachankis - 2023 - Biomedical Journal of Scientific and Technical Research 48 (3):39784-39786.
    Purpose: The purpose of the discussion is to call for an experimental trial in order to optimize the sociology of knowledge in the astronomical and cosmological sciences from a cognitive science and developmental psychology perspective. The potential of such experimental trial may also correlate developmental psychology with cosmology and astrophysics, therefore, contribute to public health from an astrobiological perspective. -/- Method: The discussion adopts a philosophizing method for the multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary proposal, with the hypothesis that proton decay in cosmology (...)
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  11. On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research.Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes - 2023 - Frontiers in Psychology 14.
    The essential proposal of this text is that psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences should be integrated and evaluated with recourse to metaphysics. It will be argued that there is a potential extra benefit to patients in psychedelic-assisted therapy if they are provided with an optional, additional, and intelligible schema and discussion of metaphysical options at the integrative phase of the therapy. This schema (the “Metaphysics Matrix”) and a new Metaphysics Matrix Questionnaire (“MMQ”) stemming therefrom will be presented, the latter of which can (...)
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  12. The Cessation of Sensory Experience and Prajñāpāramitā Philosophy.Jayarava Attwood - 2022 - International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 32 (1):111-148.
    Received traditions of Prajñāpāramitā interpretation embrace a hermeneutic in which truth and falsehood are one and the same. This philosophy has deep roots in Indian Buddhism, and it gained prominence in Europe and her colonies through the writings of D. T. Suzuki and his devotee, Edward Conze. It is relatively easy to show that the “contradictions” that form the main axiom of their reading are the result of misunderstanding the texts they relied on. Having done this I discuss a new (...)
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  13. The Phenomenal Concept Strategy Cannot Explain Problem Intuitions.Marcelino Botin - 2022 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8):7-31.
    The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we think there is a hard problem of consciousness. The meta-problem promises to help us solve the hard problem. The Phenomenal Concept Strategy promises to solve both problems at once while allowing for a metaphysics of mind that avoids dualism, which is hard to defend, and illusionism which is hard to accept. I argue that the strategy fails to fulfil this promise. Standard accounts of the PCS cannot provide an adequate (...)
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  14. Consciousness, physicalism, and the problem of mental causation.Christian Coseru - 2022 - In Itay Shani & Susanne Kathrin Beiweis (eds.), Cross-cultural approaches to consciousness: mind, nature and ultimate reality. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
    Is there such a thing as mental causation? Is it possible for the mental to have causal influence on the physical? Or has the old “mind over matter” question been rendered obsolete by the advent of brain science? Whatever our answers to these questions, it seems that we cannot systematically pursue them without considering what makes mental causation problematic in the first place: The causal closure of the physical world. This paper revisits the problem of mental causation by drawing on (...)
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  15. Consciousness, content, and cognitive attenuation: A neurophenomenological perspective.Christian Coseru - 2022 - In Rick Repetti (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. New York, NY, USA: pp. 354–367.
    This paper pursues two lines of inquiry. First, drawing on evidence from clinical literature on borderline states of consciousness, I propose a new categorical framework for liminal states of consciousness associated with certain forms of meditative attainment; second, I argue for dissociating phenomenal character from phenomenal content in accounting for the etiology of nonconceptual states of awareness. My central argument is that while the idea of nonconceptual awareness remains problematic for Buddhist philosophy of mind, our linguistic and categorizing practices cannot (...)
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  16. Objective Phenomenology.Andrew Lee - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (5).
    This paper examines the idea of objective phenomenology, or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...)
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  17. The Super Justification Argument for Phenomenal Transparency.Kevin Morris - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4):437-455.
    ABSTRACT In Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Philip Goff argues that the case against physicalist views of consciousness turns on ‘Phenomenal Transparency’, roughly the thesis that phenomenal concepts reveal the essential nature of phenomenal properties. This paper considers the argument that Goff offers for Phenomenal Transparency. The key premise is that our introspective judgments about current conscious experience are ‘Super Justified’, in that these judgments enjoy an epistemic status comparable to that of simple mathematical judgments, and a better epistemic status than (...)
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  18. What is an aesthetic concept?Andrea Sauchelli - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-17.
    Aesthetic concepts and conceptions are structured mental representations partly composed of phenomenal concepts. I defend this claim by appealing to contemporary accounts of concepts and to the current literature on phenomenal concepts. In addition, I discuss the relationship between aesthetic concepts and aesthetic understanding — an epistemic state at the centre of much work in contemporary epistemology.
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  19. Phenomenal Concepts as Complex Demonstratives.Nathan Robert Howard & N. G. Laskowski - 2021 - Res Philosophica 98 (3):499-508.
    There’s a long but relatively neglected tradition of attempting to explain why many researchers working on the nature of phenomenal consciousness think that it’s hard to explain.1 David Chalmers argues that this “meta-problem of consciousness” merits more attention than it has received. He also argues against several existing explanations of why we find consciousness hard to explain. Like Chalmers, we agree that the meta-problem is worthy of more attention. Contra Chalmers, however, we argue that there’s an existing explanation that is (...)
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  20. Phenomenal transparency and the transparency of subjecthood.Kevin Morris - 2021 - Analysis 81 (1):39-45.
    According to phenomenal transparency, phenomenal concepts are transparent where a transparent concept is one that reveals the nature of that to which it refers. What is the connection between phenomenal transparency and our concept of a subject of experience? This paper focuses on a recent argument, due to Philip Goff, for thinking that phenomenal transparency entails transparency about subjecthood. The argument is premissed on the idea that subjecthood is related to specific phenomenal properties as a determinable of more specific determinates. (...)
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  21. Goff’s revelation thesis and the epistemology of colour discrimination.Gerrit Neels - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14371-14382.
    In this paper, I raise an objection to Philip Goff’s “Revelation Thesis” as articulated in his Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. In Sect. 1 I present the Revelation Thesis in the context of Goff’s broader defence of pan-psychism. In Sect. 2 I argue that the Revelation Thesis entails the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties. In Sect. 3 I argue that the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties is false. The upshot is that the Revelation Thesis is false.
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  22. Disillusioned.Katalin Balog - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6):38-53.
    In “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness”, David Chalmers draws a new framework in which to consider the mind-body problem. In addition to trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness – the problem of why and how brain processes give rise to conscious experience –, he thinks that philosophy, psychology, neuro-science and the other cognitive sciences should also pursue a solution to what he calls the “meta-problem” of consciousness – i.e., the problem of why we think there is a problem with (...)
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  23. Hard, Harder, Hardest.Katalin Balog - 2020 - In Arthur Sullivan (ed.), Sensations, Thoughts, and Language: Essays in Honor of Brian Loar. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 265-289.
    In this paper I discuss three problems of consciousness. The first two have been dubbed the “Hard Problem” and the “Harder Problem”. The third problem has received less attention and I will call it the “Hardest Problem”. The Hard Problem is a metaphysical and explanatory problem concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological, and it concerns whether we can know, given physicalism, whether some creature physically different from us is conscious. The Hardest Problem is a problem (...)
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  24. Consciousness, Concepts and Natural Kinds.Tim Bayne & Nicholas Shea - 2020 - Philosophical Topics 48 (1):65-83.
    We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants, people with brain damage, nonhuman animals, and AI (...)
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  25. Revelation and Phenomenal Relations.Antonin Broi - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (278):22-42.
    Revelation, or the view that the essence of phenomenal properties is presented to us, is as intuitively attractive as it is controversial. It is notably at the core of defences of anti-physicalism. I propose in this paper a new argument against Revelation. It is usually accepted that low-level sensory phenomenal properties, like phenomenal red, loudness or brightness, stand in relation of similarity and quantity. Furthermore, these similarity and quantitative relations are taken to be internal, that is, to be fixed by (...)
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  26. Conceptos Fenoménicos.Diana Couto - 2020 - Enciclopedia de la Sociedad Española de Filosofía Analítica.
    Llamamos “conocimiento fenoménico” al conocimiento de nuestras experiencias conscientes: al saber cómo es tener una determinada experiencia. Los conceptos fenoménicos son aquellos asociados a este conocimiento y refieren, de modo introspectivo y directo, a las propiedades fenoménicas de nuestras experiencias. El papel que juegan estos conceptos es esencial en la filosofía de la mente contemporánea en la medida que muchos de sus defensores creen que una explicación adecuada de su naturaleza nos permitirá disipar un sinfín de rompecabezas epistemológicos (sobre la (...)
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  27. Epistemic Gaps and the Mind-Body Problem.Thomas Foerster - 2019 - Dissertation, Cornell University
    This dissertation defends materialism from the epistemic arguments against materialism. Materialism is the view that everything is ultimately physical. The epistemic arguments against materialism claim that there is an epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths (for example, that knowing the physical truths does not put you in a position to know the phenomenal truths), and conclude from this that there is a corresponding gap in the world between physical and phenomenal truths, and materialism is false. -/- Chapter 1 introduces (...)
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  28. What Acquaintance Teaches.Alex Grzankowski & Michael Tye - 2019 - In Thomas Raleigh & Jonathan Knowles (eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays. Oxford University Press. pp. 75–94.
    In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object-knowledge rather than propositional-knowledge. To know what it is like (...)
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  29. Phenomenal Concepts and Physical Facts: A Dialogue with Mary.Tufan Kiymaz - 2019 - Filozofia 74 (10):797-807.
    This is a dialogue between an opponent of the phenomenal concept strategy and Mary from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. In this dialogue, Mary, who has complete physical knowledge about what it is like to see red, but has never seen red, is a physicalist and she defends the phenomenal concept strategy against her interlocutor’s objections. In the end, none of them is able to convince the other, but their conversation, through considerations of different versions of the knowledge argument and different (...)
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  30. On the Meta-Problem.J. Levine - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (9-10):148-159.
    According to Chalmers (2018), the meta-problem of consciousness is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness'. In this paper I argue that the key to understanding both consciousness itself and addressing the meta-problem is to understand what acquaintance is and what its objects are. Unfortunately, I think there are still some serious mysteries lurking here, which I present briefly in this commentary. In particular, on the view of acquaintance I favour, it is unclear (...)
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  31. Mastering Mary.Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4):361-370.
    I make three claims about the interactions between concept mastery and the knowledge argument. First, I argue that, contra Ball, the concept mastery response to the knowledge argument does not suffer from the heterogeneity of concept mastery. Second, I argue that, when doing metaphysics by relating propositions on the basis of whether a hypothetical agent who knew a base collection could infer a target proposition, it is legitimate to rely on propositions that are not contained in the base, as long (...)
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  32. Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy.Andreas Elpidorou - 2018 - New York: Routledge.
    _Physicalism and the Spell of Consciousness_ explores the nature of consciousness, arguing that ontologically speaking, consciousness and matter are one and the same since both are physical entities. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou develops an account of the concepts that we deploy when we introspectively examine our conscious experiences, and defends the view that the uniqueness (...)
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  33. Metaphysics of Quantity and the Limit of Phenomenal Concepts.Derek Lam - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (3):1-20.
    Quantities like mass and temperature are properties that come in degrees. And those degrees (e.g. 5 kg) are properties that are called the magnitudes of the quantities. Some philosophers (e.g., Byrne 2003; Byrne & Hilbert 2003; Schroer 2010) talk about magnitudes of phenomenal qualities as if some of our phenomenal qualities are quantities. The goal of this essay is to explore the anti-physicalist implication of this apparently innocent way of conceptualizing phenomenal quantities. I will first argue for a metaphysical thesis (...)
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  34. Once More Unto the Breach: Type B Physicalism, Phenomenal Concepts, and the Epistemic Gap.Janet Levin - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):57-71.
    ABSTRACTType B, or a posteriori, physicalism is the view that phenomenal-physical identity statements can be necessarily true, even though they cannot be known a priori—and that the key to understanding their status is to understand the special features of our phenomenal concepts, those concepts of our experiential states acquired through introspection. This view was once regarded as a promising response to anti-physicalist arguments that maintain that an epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical concepts entails that phenomenal and physical properties are (...)
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  35. Chalmersin argumentti materialismia vastaan.Panu Raatikainen - 2018 - Ajatus 75 (1):401-444.
    Artikkelissa tarkastellaan perusteellisesti ja kriittisesti David Chalmersin vaikutusvaltaista fenomenaaliseen tietoisuuden liittyvää argumenttia materialismia vastaan. Argumentissa tunnistetaan useampikin kuin yksi heikko lenkki.
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  36. A Posteriori Physicalism and the Discrimination of Properties.Philip Woodward - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (1):121-143.
    According to a posteriori physicalism, phenomenal properties are physical properties, despite the unbridgeable cognitive gap that holds between phenomenal concepts and physical concepts. Current debates about a posteriori physicalism turn on what I call “the perspicuity principle”: it is impossible for a suitably astute cognizer to possess concepts of a certain sort—viz., narrow concepts—without being able to tell whether the referents of those concepts are the same or different. The perspicuity principle tends to strike a posteriori physicalists as implausibly rationalistic; (...)
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  37. Consciousness and Meaning: Selected Essays by Brian Loar.Katalin Balog & Stephanie Beardman - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Kati Balog, Stephanie Beardman & Stephen R. Schiffer.
    One of the most important problems of twentieth century analytic philosophy concern the place of the mind – and in particular, of consciousness and intentionality – in a physical universe. Brian Loar’s essays in the philosophy of mind in this volume include his major contributions in this area. His central concern was how to understand consciousness and intentionality from the subjective perspective, and especially, how to understand subjectivity in a physical universe. He was committed to the reality and reliability of (...)
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  38. A Posteriori Physicalism and Introspection.Andreas Elpidorou - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (1):474-500.
    Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature (...)
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  39. Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.Philip Goff - 2017 - New York, USA: Oup Usa.
    The first half of this book argues that physicalism cannot account for consciousness, and hence cannot be true. The second half explores and defends Russellian monism, a radical alternative to both physicalism and dualism. The view that emerges combines panpsychism with the view that the universe as a whole is fundamental.
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  40. Phenomenal, Normative, and Other Explanatory Gaps: A General Diagnosis.Neil Mehta - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):567-591.
    I assume that there exists a general phenomenon, the phenomenon of the explanatory gap, surrounding consciousness, normativity, intentionality, and more. Explanatory gaps are often thought to foreclose reductive possibilities wherever they appear. In response, reductivists who grant the existence of these gaps have offered countless local solutions. But typically such reductivist responses have had a serious shortcoming: because they appeal to essentially domain-specific features, they cannot be fully generalized, and in this sense these responses have been not just local but (...)
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  41. On a Confusion About Which Intuitions to Trust: From the Hard Problem to a Not Easy One.Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2017 - Topoi 36 (1):31-40.
    Alleged self-evidence aside, conceivability arguments are one of the main reasons in favor of the claim that there is a Hard Problem. These arguments depend on the appealing Kripkean intuition that there is no difference between appearances and reality in the case of consciousness. I will argue that this intuition rests on overlooking a distinction between cognitive access and consciousness, which has received recently important empirical support. I will show that there are good reasons to believe that the intuition is (...)
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  42. Vagueness and zombies: why ‘phenomenally conscious’ has no borderline cases.Jonathan A. Simon - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (8):2105-2123.
    I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a borderline case. I then appeal to (...)
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  43. How Physicalists Can—and Cannot—Explain the Seeming “Absurdity” of Physicalism.Pär Sundström - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (3):681-703.
    According to a widely held physicalist view, consciousness is identical with some physical or functional phenomenon just as liquidity is identical with loose molecular connection. To many of us, this claim about consciousness seems more problematic than the claim about liquidity. To many—including many physicalists—the identification of consciousness with some physical phenomenon even seems “absurd” or “crazy”. A full defence of physicalism should explain why the allegedly correct hypothesis comes across this way. If physicalism is true and we have reason (...)
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  44. Revelation and physicalism.Kelly Trogdon - 2017 - Synthese 194 (7):2345-2366.
    Discussion of the challenge that acquaintance with the nature of experience poses to physicalism.
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  45. Thomas Nagel’ın 'Fizikalizm' ve 'Yarasa Olmak Nasıl Bir Şeydir' Makalelerinin Bilince Nesnel Bir Açıklama Verme Arayışı Açısından Kıyaslanması.Serdal Tümkaya - 2017 - Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy 7 (1):23-41.
    Thomas Nagel’ın “Yarasa Olmak Nasıl bir Şeydir” makalesi ve “Hiçbir Yerden Bakış” adlı kitabı aşırı derecede alıntılanmış iki eserdir. Buradaki argümanlar sıklıkla bilincin öznel boyutunun nesnel-bilimsel bir açıklamasının tümüyle yapılabilmesinin mümkün olmadığını gösteren, veya fizikalizmin sıkıntılarını dile getiren, veya düpedüz fizikalizmin bir reddi olarak algılanmış veya kullanılmışlardır. Bu çalışmamda her üç algının da, değişen oranlarda, hatalı olduğunu savunuyorum. Tezimi savunabilmek için, söylediğim üç ana yorumun, her birini özetliyor ve bunların her birinin neden yanlış olduğunu gösteriyorum. Böylelikle Nagel’ın ana projesi olan (...)
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  46. Dissolving type‐b physicalism.Helen Yetter-Chappell - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):469-498.
    The majority of physicalists are type-B physicalists – believing that the phenomenal-physical truths are only knowable a posteriori. This paper aims to show why this view is misguided. The strategy is to design an agent who (1) has full general physical knowledge, (2) has phenomenal concepts, and yet (3) is wired such that she would be in a position to immediately work out the phenomenal-physical truths. I argue that this derivation yields a priori knowledge. The possibility of such a creature (...)
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  47. Illusionism's discontent.Katalin Balog - 2016 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (11-12):40-51.
    Frankish positions his view, illusionism about qualia (a.k.a. eliminativist physicalism), in opposition to what he calls radical realism (dualism and neutral monism) and conservative realism (a.k.a. non-eliminativist physicalism). Against radical realism, he upholds physicalism. But he goes along with key premises of the Gap Arguments for radical realism, namely, 1) that epistemic/explanatory gaps exist between the physical and the phenomenal, and 2) that every truth should be perspicuously explicable from the fundamental truth about the world; and he concludes that because (...)
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  48. Infallibility, Acquaintance, and Phenomenal Concepts.Wolfgang Barz - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (2):139-168.
    In recent literature, there is a strong tendency to endorse the following argument: There are particular judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences that are infallible; if there are particular judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences that are infallible, then the infallibility of those judgments is due to the relation of acquaintance; therefore, acquaintance explains why those particular judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences are infallible. The aim of this paper is to examine critically both the first and the second premise (...)
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  49. Do phenomenal concepts misrepresent?Darragh Byrne - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (5):669-678.
    Many contemporary physicalists concede to dualists that conscious subjects have distinctive “phenomenal concepts” of the phenomenal qualities of their experiences. Indeed, they contend that idiosyncratic characteristics of these concepts facilitate responses to influential anti-physicalist arguments. Like some some other critics of this approach, James Tartaglia maintains that phenomenal concepts express contents that conflict with physicalism, but as a physicalist, the moral he distinctively draws from this is that phenomenal concepts misrepresent. He contends further that the contemporary physicalists’ account cannot accommodate (...)
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  50. Embodied Conceivability: How to Keep the Phenomenal Concept Strategy Grounded.Guy Dove & Andreas Elpidorou - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (5):580-611.
    The Phenomenal Concept Strategy offers the physicalist perhaps the most promising means of explaining why the connection between mental facts and physical facts appears to be contingent even though it is not. In this article, we show that the large body of evidence suggesting that our concepts are often embodied and grounded in sensorimotor systems speaks against standard forms of the PCS. We argue, nevertheless, that it is possible to formulate a novel version of the PCS that is thoroughly in (...)
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