The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of (...) awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy puts forward a bold and original theory of consciousness, one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. He analyses consciousness into purely psychological constituents, according pre-eminence to its epistemological power; the result is an integrated picture of the conscious mind in its natural physical setting. Consciousness and the World is a rich and exciting book, a major contribution to our understanding of the mind.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of (...) awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XII*—Processes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 215–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XI*—Seeing the Light, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

I have no comment to make on the aesthetic merits of these verses. I have put them at the head of my discussion because they happen to introduce a cluster of concepts connected with forgiveness: pride, love, hate, God, friendship, goodwill, eternity, offence, condemnation, resentment, blame. We may think that some, but not all, of these have essential connections with the concept in which we are interested. And we may, of course, think that the list is incomplete. Other obvious candidates (...) spring to mind: pity, for example, repentance, compassion, punishment and pardoning. (shrink)

Additional arguments for sense‐data begin by defending the claim that perceptual sensations are psychological individuals, examples being phosphenes, after‐images, and the ‘ringings’ of ‘tinnitus’. Five arguments for sense‐data follow. First, that since corresponding to every veridical visual field is a possible non‐veridical visual field of sensations, the latter merely needs a different and regular outer cause to be deemed veridical. Second, since bodily sensation experience is extremely strong evidence for the existence of a matching sensation cause, the experience of ‘ringing’ (...) must be strong evidence that a ‘ringing’ sensation is its cause, and this holds in the veridical hearing of a ringing sound. Third, that it is inconceivable that one has a truly visual experience of a red visual field, and absolutely nothing red‐looking be there before one had noticed. Fourth, that the experience of sound might have had a different developmental history, in which first there was merely experience of auditory sensation, and then over millennia such experience gradually found itself caused by regular outer phenomena, thereby constituting the hearing of sound. And a fifth argument that resembles the first argument. (shrink)

Mental health, in one awake, guarantees that person knowledge of the central phenomenon-contents of his own mind, under an adequate classificatory heading. This is the primary thesis of the paper. That knowledge is not itself a phenomenon-content, and usually is achieved in no way. Rather, it stems from the natural accessibility of mental phenomenon-contents to wakeful consciousness. More precisely, when mental normality obtains, such knowledge necessarily obtains in wakeful consciousness. This thesis conjoins a version of Cartesianism with the concepts of (...) mental health and human nature. Demonstration of the thesis requires that we show that a particular human mental potential fails fully to be realized when such self-awareness is impaired. That potential is for consciousness of the world (w-Cs), wakefulness. W-Cs divides into consciousness of the outer world (ow-Cs), and consciousness of the inner world (iw-Cs), and we need to demonstrate an essential dependence of ow-Cs upon iw-Cs. Now w-Cs is the adoption of the correct occurrent epistemological posture to the world, and this involves free rational determination of occurrent cognitive attitudes via the internal systematized knowledge of the world, which requires adequate awareness of mental phenomenon-contents. Therefore ow-Cs needs iw-Cs. This is displayed in mental structural accounts of hypnotic, drunken, and psychotic disturbances of consciousness. (For we endorse a structural account of mental health.) We show how failures of self-consciousness entail disturbed modes of determination of cognitive attitudes by the knowledge-system, which is loss of contact with the personal yet true internal representation of the world, which is loss of contact with reality, which is a disturbance both of w-Cs and of consciousness itself. (shrink)

The aim is to discover a principle governing the formation of the dream. Now dreaming has an analogy with consciousness in that it is a seeming-consciousness. Meanwhile consciousness exhibits a tripartite structure consisting of understanding oneself to be situated in a world endowed with given properties, the mental processes responsible for the state, and the concrete perceptual encounter of awareness with the world. The dream analogues of these three elements are investigated in the hope of discovering the source of the (...) kinship between dream and consciousness. The dream world proves to be a logically impossible world, limited by nothing more than sheer narratability. The internal world of the dreamer is notable for the limitlessness of the scope allotted to the imagination, together with the presence of two important phenomena encountered in waking consciousness: a measure of interiority, and the positing of a world. Finally, the dream further replicates consciousness in so far as we seem in dreaming concretely to experience our physical surrounds in the form of perceptual imagining. These properties play their part in enabling the dream to be a seeming-consciousness. At the same time they are such as to necessitate its not being consciousness. It is proposed that in the light of these properties, and those composing the state of consciousness, the dream simply is the imagining of consciousness. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XII*—Processes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 215–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of (...) awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

The discussion that follows establishes a three-way conversation between two films, Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out [2001]) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence [2008]) and one work of theory, Maurizio Lazzarato’s La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: essai sur la condition néo-libérale (The Making of Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition [2011]). The subject of the conversation will be neo-liberal governance and the role of debt within it. Part of Lazzarato’s argument regards the (...) central role debt has played since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008. But another part of his argument is that during the neo-liberal era, debt has been a, if not the .. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of (...) awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

This volume provides the fundamentals needed to understand the various explanatory systems and methodologies used in the behavior sciences and to evaluate their findings, in particular the literature and findings on buyer behavior. In clear prose, the author discusses the key issues in modern philosophy, psychology, and sociology and their relevance for the student of marketing and buyer behavior. O'Shaughnessy exploits insights from many disciplines as to the many ways to derive understanding of behavioral phenomena, making it accessible not (...) only to academics and students of marketing, but to professionals as well. (shrink)

In a way this is the most fundamental of the senses, being as necessary to animality as the capacity for bodily action. It is of central import for this sense that bodily sensations do not represent bodily or tactile space. The varieties of touch, which range from point‐contact to exploration across space and time of the shape of objects, are characterized. Since we perceive simple object shapes through awareness of the shape of bodily movements, space‐representationalism must be true in simple (...) cases, and while more complex cases differ they are yet constituted out of such representational relations. Then both the shape one seems to perceive, and what one actually perceives and discovers, depend on what one knows and assumes concerning the shape and stability of one's body and the object. This dependence of perceptual inquiry and discovery upon a fund of knowledge is found throughout the senses. It points to the existence of a measure of innate knowledge concerning the environment. The mutual dependence of proprioception and the sense of touch is demonstrated, and disposes of the theory that body‐awareness precedes all other awareness. (shrink)

Michael Abecassis 'Le Petit Theatre de Renoir: Martin O'Shaughnessy's _Jean Renoir_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 8, March 2004.

The concept of an appearance is bona fide and rule‐governed. It is such that appearances can be shared, which suggests that a visual appearance is a complex universal, compounded out of colour and spatial appearance. The only appearance material objects have is their look, because uniquely in the case of sight when the Attention lands upon its colour it lands upon the object, and it lands upon the object through landing upon its secondary quality. We experience the visual appearance when (...) we perceive the bearer to be endowed with those visible qualities that visually individuate it for us. Now the primary appearance in Physical Reality is the look of a material object, a ‘look in the round’, upon which aspect‐appearance is dependent. The relation between the two is charted, together with the vital role of the understanding in experiencing ‘looks in the round’, an experience that depends upon knowledge of the objective physical situation in which it occurs. Finally, the criteria of visibility are spelt out. (shrink)

What is implicit in a typically human perception of a material object? First, perceivability is a contingent property of its bearer, relative to perceiver and conditions. Typically, human perception is special in involving the use of concepts and an awareness of object‐structures. When we visually recognize a material object, an almost limitless array of properties and procedures are by implication condensed into an instant: one entertains multiple beliefs, and posits at a distance, multiple properties. Then the experiential integration of the (...) almost limitless visual evidence of a material object is dubbed ‘constituting the material object out of experience’. Central concepts in doing so are those of side, outside, surface, interior, and part. The most important of these experiential syntheses is the spatial, whose unit is the 3D‐seeing of object‐sides, a concept that depends upon those of 2D/3D and 2D/2D seeing. Two vitally important elements in this procedure are, first, the work of the understanding, second, an awareness of the objective physical situation of perceiver and object. (shrink)

Secondary qualities are essential to sight, hearing, smell, and taste, and correspond to the sensations definitive of each sense. They are relative, first to which beings they appear to, secondly to the conditions under which they do so. Dispositionist analyses are examined, along with materialist, and rejected: the former because colour is predicable of after‐images, the latter because a disjunct of material properties in principle ‘found’ any secondary quality. While attributions to physical objects are relative, attribution to sensations are absolute: (...) sensations of red are absolutely, intrinsically, essentially red. ‘Red’ names the look predicable necessarily of the sensation of red and contingently and derivatively of much else. What is of central importance to the secondary quality, indeed the rationale behind the very concept, is that it is the only psychological phenomenon that can be an immediate material or external object of noticing. From this unique property, compounded with the psycho‐physical nomic situation governing its objectification, flows the special utility of the secondary quality. Namely, to take its place as material object for the Attention in an experience in which it simultaneously qualifies a whole string of causally interrelated items: sensation, light, surface, side, and object. (shrink)

In perception, objects come to the attention. Accordingly, one might come to believe that ‘The Attention’ names the capacity to harbour events of the specific idiosyncratic type, noticing. In fact it signifies an experiential mental space to which objects can come in perception and, which can contain experiences. After all, many mental phenomena other than perception require awareness if they are to so much as exist, e.g. emotion and thought, thanks to being experiences. That experiential space is of limited extent, (...) for at any moment the mind can experience so much and no more. Indeed, the space is no more than the existence of such a limit, and has no autonomous existence other than the fact of that limit, and it is a dangerous illusion to hypostatize the limit as a real space, leading one to misunderstand what it is to experience an experience. Then there is reason for supposing that the experiences of the moment constitute a system. This circle or centre of awareness is the Attention. And it is to this Attention that perceived existents come—as object. This happens when a noticing or perceiving occurs. (shrink)

The definition of perception is defended by piecemeal assembling of the concept of perception. We begin with the assumption that some event is an intentionally directed experience; add that it is of a type that aspires to ‘success’‐status, as seem‐see and try‐act aspire to status see and act ; and add that the object actually exists, and that the ‘aspiration’ is successful. Now this complex property fits both action and perception. Then to define action we have the need of a (...) further and indefinable concept, that of will, whereas to define perception we have all the conceptual material we need, for we need no more than the concepts, experience, and object. Perception is unique in being the only experience that finds its identity under the concept of experience, for it is merely awareness or experience taking an extensional object. Then since consciousness and experience are universal to any account of mind, perception likewise must have a position of centrality in the mind. It is an a priori‐given a priori‐definable concept, built out of a priori‐given concepts.. (shrink)

Typically our perceptions occur in the setting of an active perceptual process. This chapter attempts to analyse active attending, and in particular, active perceptual attending. The exemplar phenomenon discussed is listening, which is a mental activity. Now mental actions fall into three different structural kinds, exemplified in soliloquy/recollecting/active attending, and the aim is the structural analysis of the latter. Theories as to the relation between listening and hearing are examined, and the conclusion reached is that listening encompasses that part of (...) the co‐present hearing that owes its existence to the will, a sector that inevitably has no more than a probabilistic measure. But how could hearing immediately derive from willing? This puzzle finds its resolution in the character of the special causal situation realized in listening. While will and sound are distinct existents with non‐identical causal powers, they are token‐identical causal agencies in the generation of the hearing sector of listening. This strange analysis vindicates the concept of active attending. (shrink)

Why is consciousness so closely linked to perception? It is because consciousness is directed to the World, and perception our ultimate mode of access to the World. Thus, the most fundamental of the empirical relations of consciousness to the World is the perceptual. Through it the mind acquires both the content necessary for intentionality, and an awareness of the setting in which to lead a life. What does consciousness bring to this situation? Apart from availability of the perceptual Attention, the (...) most important property is the rationality of the state. Two mental conditions of rationality were explored: self‐knowledge, and an overall mental activeness and pre‐eminently the active process of thinking. Then in the state of consciousness thus constituted we typically encounter the phenomenon of perception, set in the stream of experience, the unique experience, which is of the species‐type, experience‐of. Here we have the original epistemological relation between consciousness and the World, and the basis of all more developed or thought‐mediated intentional consciousnesses. Then, sight has a multitude of assets that make it the most effective example to demonstrate how in the perceptions of the conscious we encounter the fully constituted object in its universal setting. At that point, consciousness fufils an appointed destiny. (shrink)

Rationality of state is essential to consciousness, and depends both on self‐knowledge and on mental activeness—and above all upon the mental activity of thinking. What contribution does the overall activeness of the stream of consciousness make to the obtaining of consciousness? It firstly contributes to the epistemological and perceptual function, through ordering perceptual process. But it secondly conditions the intelligibility of the stream of consciousness of the conscious. The least apparently active experiences of the conscious, such as daydreaming, are shown (...) to be intentionally active, along with the others. This activeness makes possible rationality and explanatorial pellucidity in the development of that ‘stream’, which would otherwise be absent, because of the close link between activeness and rationality. This internal intelligibility has epistemological repercussions, for it is a necessary condition for making sense of the outer phenomenal world. (shrink)

The aim is to provide a theory of consciousness, and of the relation of consciousness through perception with the World. Consciousness is not a mystery, being an internal state analysable into internal constituents. However, it is essentially directed to the World, and this necessitates some knowledge of the World. Certain epistemological powers are peculiar to it, but are they essential? It emerges that consciousness necessitates an accessible perceptual attentive capacity. This is demonstrated through appeal to the principle: the conscious are (...) ‘in touch with’ Reality, and are of necessity oriented towards the truth. Part of the proof turns upon the theory that perception is the sheer presence to awareness of extensionally given phenomenal objects. It contacts objects, not propositions. This is accomplished through the mediation of perceptual ‘proxies’ like side, surface, and ultimately also in seeing through light and visual sensations. However, even prior to this encounter, a ‘The Visual Given’ is presented to consciousness, a causal posit necessitated by the presence of mental causation in the aetiology of the visual experience. This is where the ‘journey’ of the Attention begins, and it ends in Physical Reality, in a complex mental perceptual‐cognitive phenomenon in which in humans the conceptual powers of the mind are engaged in constituting the physical object and its universal setting. Consciousness has from the start an appointment in the concrete with the World in its ultimate physical form, and the introduction sets out to explain how it is that it keeps that appointment. (shrink)

The stream of consciousness of the waking conscious manifests both meaningfulness and interiority as the dream does not. The variety of meaning involved is spelt out. It emerges that it is a derivative of the overall mental activeness of consciousness together with the fact that the activeness pre‐eminently includes the thinking process. This is the one active experiential line that carries its own rationale, for thinking is a mental willing, which par excellence knows where it is going, indeed is the (...) meaning‐giver par excellence in the mind. The nature of thinking is investigated, including the rationale of its close link with the use of language. Thinking is an active process of engendering phenomena in one's understanding, whose object is a changing entity expressed in the symbolism that encapsulates thought. It lies at the heart of consciousness, being the custodial agency responsible for the continuing state of rationality necessary for the state, and is coincident with the interiority of that state. (shrink)

Proprioception is true perceiving. It and touch form a closely linked mutually dependent yet diverse pair. The puzzle whereby the demands upon the Attention of proprioception are no distraction in instrumental action is resoluble through the fact that the internal active content within an instrumental deed is a harmonious hierarchy. The ‘long‐term body image’ is a causally posited something whose content encompasses body shape, which is a necessary but insufficient condition of proprioception of body shape and posture. It is distinct (...) from the ‘short‐term body image’, which designates the internal content of the proprioceptive perception of the body at any moment. The main philosophical problem consists in assembling a bona fide veridical concept of the long‐term image. Reasons for positing it begin with the common content in the short‐term images over lengthy periods. But they must be supplemented by the fact that bodily sensations do not represent body shape, being already dependent on body‐awareness for both individuation and position. Only through hypothesizing a long‐term image can one make sense of proprioception. Reasons are given for believing the body image is a dispositional psychological phenomenon, it is one and the same when explaining proprioception and sensation‐location, it is an empirical postulate, and even though it falls short of being an a priori necessity, it is as deeply embedded in animal existence as proprioception. (shrink)