Time to account for consciousness.

摘要

My dissertation seeks to illuminate the contemporary consciousness debate over the nature of self-consciousness (specifically, how is it that consciousness entails ubiquitous conscious of itself) with a number of insights found in the works of Brentano and Husserl.;In Part One of the first chapter I explore Franz Brentano's account of consciousness from his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), paying particular attention to his notion of incidental awareness. In the second part of the first chapter I present Edmund Husserl's notion of consciousness from his Logical Investigations (1901/1913). I conclude this chapter by defending my reading of Husserl against Karen Gloy who argues that Husserl fails to appreciate anything more than object-awareness in consciousness, as opposed to non-objectifying-awareness.;In the second chapter I show how Husserl's account of time-consciousness fills out his account of consciousness in general, in the spirit of Brentano's notion of incidental awareness. I conclude the second chapter in two ways. First, I defend Husserl against Gloy's further objection that in Husserl, in his theorizing on time-consciousness, continues to exclusively restrict consciousness to object-awareness only. I then support John Brough's interpretation of the structure of time-consciousness against Dan Zahavi's challenges.;In Part One of the third chapter, I show how my historically motivated temporal approach to self-consciousness, unlike other approaches, withstands the misrepresentation objection (which holds that approaches accounting for self-consciousness in terms of representations alone cannot properly account for cases where one is conscious of being in a state that one is not in fact not in). I then show, in Part Two, how the temporal approach to consciousness, unlike a competing answer championed by Alva Noe, can account for the difference had between the experiences of details in the center, as opposed to the periphery, of the visual field.