Three Facets of Consciousness

David Woodruff Smith

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139165327.005

1 - Three Facets of Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

David Woodruff Smith

Show author details

David Woodruff Smith: Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Abstract: Over the past century phenomenology has ably analyzed the basic structures of consciousness as we experience it. Yet recent philosophy of mind, concerned more with brain activity and computational function, has found it difficult to make room for the structures of subjectivity and intentionality that phenomenology has appraised. In order to understand consciousness as something that is both subjective and grounded in neural activity, we need to delve into phenomenology and ontology. I draw a fundamental distinction in ontology among the form, appearance, and substrate of any entity. Applying this three-facet ontology to consciousness, we distinguish the intentionality of consciousness (its form); the way we experience consciousness (its appearance, including so-called qualia); and the physical, biological, and cultural basis of consciousness (its substrate). We can thus show how these very different aspects of consciousness fit together in a fundamental ontology. And we can thereby define the proper domains of phenomenology and other disciplines that contribute to our understanding of consciousness.

The Problem of Consciousness

Lately, philosophers and scientists have been looking for mind in all the wrong places. Physicalists of all stripes have focused primarily on the physical conditions of consciousness, from neural activity to computational function. Meanwhile, humanists – historicists, postmodernists, culture critics – have looked primarily to the cultural conditions of our discourse, as if consciousness did not exist in its own right (expressed in art and literature) but is “theorized” in a cultural tradition of phenomenology or science or humanistic discourse.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Mind World
Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology
, pp. 10 - 41

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165327.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Armstrong, David M. 1989. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder: Westview Press

Armstrong, David M. 1997. A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Block, Ned, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere, eds. 1997. The Nature of Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Churchland, Patricia Smith. 1986. Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Churchland, Paul M. 1995. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Davidson, Donald. 1970. “Mental Events.” Reprinted in Davidson, Essays on Actions, Causes, and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980

Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown

Dretske, Fred. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Dretske, Fred. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Dreyfus, Hubert L. (with Harrison Hall), ed. 1982. Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Fine, Kit. 1995. “Ontological Dependence.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95: 269–90CrossRef Google Scholar

F⊘llesdal, Dagfinn. 1982. “Husserl's Notion of Noema.” In Dreyfus 1982. First published in Journal of Philosophy, 1969

Fodor, Jerry A. 1975. The Language of Thought. New York: Cromwell

Fodor, Jerry 1994. The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Heidegger, Martin. 1988. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Revised ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. German original, 1975, from a lecture course in 1927

Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Ideas [Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book]: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Humanities Press. First English edition, 1931; German original, 1913

Husserl, Edmund. 1970a. Logical Investigations. Vols. 1 and 2. Translated by J. N. Findlay from the revised, second German edition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. New edition, edited with an introduction by Dermot Moran, and with a preface by Michael Dummett. London: Routledge, 2001. German original, 1900–1, revised 1913 (Prolegomena and Investigations I–V), 1920 (Investigation VI)

Husserl, Edmund. 1970b. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Original manuscript from 1935–38

Husserl, Edmund. 1991. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Phenomenological Investigations of Constitution [or as translated: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution]. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. German original, 1952, drafted initially in 1912, revised in 1915 and again in 1928

Husserl, Edmund. ISO/IEC TR 9007. 1987. Information Processing Systems – Concepts and Terminology for the Conceptual Schema and the Information Base. International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva

Kim, Jaegwon. 1994. Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kim, Jaegwon. 1998. Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Lewis, David K. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. New York: Basil Blackwell

Mayr, Ernst, and Peter D. Ashlock. 1991. Principles of Systematic Zoology. 2d. New York: McGraw-Hill

Millikan, Ruth G. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Mohanty, J. N. 1985. The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 4: 435–50CrossRef Google Scholar

Penrose, Roger. 1994. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Petitot, Jean, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy, eds. 1999. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press in collaboration with Cambridge University Press

Rescher, Nicholas. 1996. Process Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Searle, John R. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” In W. F. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press

Simons, Peter. 1987. Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Simons, Peter, and David Woodruff Smith. 1993. “The Philosophical Foundations of PACIS.” Paper presented at the Sixteenth International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria. August

Smith, Barry, ed. 1982. Parts and Moments. Munich: Philosophia Verlag

Smith, David Woodruff. 1989. The Circle of Acquaintance. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers

Smith, Barry 1995. “Mind and Body.” In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, pp. 323–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Smith, Barry 1999a. “Intentionality Naturalized?” In Petitot et al. 1999: 83–110

Smith, Barry 1999b. “Background Ideas.” Translated into Italian as “Idee di sfondo,” Paradigmi (Estratto da PARADIGMI, Rivista di critica filosofica) (Rome), Anno XVII, 49 (January–April 1999): 7–37

Smith, Barry 2000a. “Consciousness and Actuality in Whiteheadian Ontology.” In Liliana Albertazzi, ed., The Origins of the Cognitive Sciences, 1870–1930: Theories of Representation, pp. 1–30. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers

Smith, Barry 2000b. “How Is Transcendental Philosophy – of Mind and World – Possible?” In Bina Gupta, ed., The Empirical and the Transcendental: A Fusion of Horizons (Festschrift in Honor of J. N. Mohanty), pp. 169–79. New York: Rowman and Littlefield

Smith, Barry 2000c. “Ontological Phenomenology.” In Mark Gedney, ed., Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 7: Modern Philosophy. Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green University

Smith, David Woodruff, and Ronald McIntyre. 1982. Husserl and Intentionality. Dordrecht: D. Reidel

Sokolowski, Robert 2000. “Transcendental Phenomenology.” In Mark Gedney, ed., Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 7: Modern Philosophy. Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green University

Thomasson, Amie L. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Roesche. 1993. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, Macmillan. First edition, 1929

Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.