Online research in philosophy

Subjectivity is essential to consciousness. But though subjectivity is necessary for consciousness it is not sufficient. In part one I derive a distinction between conscious awareness and unconscious subjectivity from a critique of Block’s (1995) distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. In part two I contrast two historically influential models of unconscious thought: cognitive and psychoanalytic. The widely held cognitive model does not cover, as it should, the class of "for me" mental states that remain unconscious. In particular, personalist approaches to emotion require a theory of unconscious subjectivity to handle the case of unconscious emotion.

In this paper I investigate the notion of an unconscious intention as it is discussed and defended in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I am concerned with two issues: first, whether the evidence that Freud adduces supports his conclusion that there are unconscious intentions, and, second, whether the notion of an unconscious intention is coherent. I call into question some of Freud's arguments to support the notion, and I present a case for the incoherence of the notion. Finally, I suggest how one might begin to reconcile my argument for its incoherence with an argument for the existence of unconscious intentions.

Few contemporary researchers in psychology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences have any doubt about whether mental phenomena occur without being conscious. There is extensive and convincing clinical and experimental evidence for the existence of thoughts, desires, and related mental states that aren’t conscious. We characterize thoughts, desires, intentions, expectations, hopes, and many other mental states in terms of the things they are about and, more fully, in terms of their content, as captured by a sentence nominalization, such as a clause beginning with the word ‘that’. The philosophical literature follows Franz Brentano’s adaptation of Thomist terminology in referring to all such states as intentional states. But there is another type of mental phenomena, which lack intentionality and whose mental nature consists instead of some qualitative feature. These states include bodily sensations, such as aches and pains, and perceptual states, such as visual sensations of color and tactile sensations of heat and cold. And these states all exhibit some mental quality or another, such as the mental quality distinctive of pain or the mental quality of red or blue.1 And even theorists who acknowledge that intentional states can and do occur without being conscious have sometimes insisted that qualitative states cannot. There is, according to these theorists, nothing to a state’s being qualitative or exhibiting some mental quality unless that state is conscious – unless it is, as we might metaphorically say, “lighted up”. It’s striking that Freud himself seems to have adopted this double standard toward the two types of mental state. In his metapsychological paper, “The Unconscious”, for example, he writes that “all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so forth, can be applied to [unconscious mental occurrences]” (Freud 1915e, p. 168). But he seems here to have in..

Some contemporary philosophers – most notably John Searle and Galen Strawson – have persisted in the Cartesian intuition that consciousness and intentionality are somehow essentially connected. Descartes himself held that the relation between consciousness and intentionality is especially intimate: there can be no unconscious mental states of any kind; and no creature incapable of consciousness is capable of mentality. Descartes’s view is widely acknowledged to have been discredited by Freud, and by contemporary cognitive science. Freud argued that the best explanations for much of human behavior require that we suppose there are unconscious states, such as beliefs and desires, with intentional content. If the explanation of behavior requires us to advert to states with intentional content, then it requires us to advert to unconscious states with intentional content. Moreover, much of the explanatory success of cognitive science depends upon the supposition of “sub-personal” and otherwise unconscious mental representations. Contrary to what Descartes believed, a great deal – perhaps even most – of our intentional mental life goes on unnoticed by us. Anyone who accepts the Freudian thesis, but who maintains that nonetheless there is a substantive sense in which intentionality is impossible without consciousness, is faced with the difficult task of reconciling these seemingly incompatible theses. Both Searle and Strawson allow that intentional states can be unconscious. However, they both attempt to honor the Cartesian intuition by placing restrictions on the conditions under..

Machine generated contents note: Introduction: the historiography of the unconscious; Part I. The Subject Before the Unconscious: 1. A general science of the I: Fichte and the crisis of self-identification; 2. Natural autonomy: Schelling and the divisions of freedom; Part II. The Romantic Unconscious: 3. Divining the individual: towards a metaphysics of the unconscious; 4. The historical unconscious; 5. Post-idealism and the Romantic psyche; Part III. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious: 6. Freud: the Geist in the machine; 7. The liberal unconscious; Conclusion.

This paper argues against the view that the Freudian unconscious can be understood as an extension of ordinary belief-desire psychology. The paper argues that Freud’s picture of the mind challenges the paradigm of folk psychology, as it is understood by much contemporary philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The dynamic unconscious postulated by psychoanalysis operates according to rules and principles which are distinct in kind from those rules that organise rational and conscious thought. Psychoanalysis offers us a radical reconception of our ordinary way of thinking about our own minds.