Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge

I just received my copy of Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowlege: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism, edited by Torin Alter and Sven Walter.  There have been quite a few collections of new papers on consciousness in recent years, but I think this is the best of them.  It's focused on what has become the central set of issues in the debate over materialism and dualism about consciousness: namely, the epistemic and ontological gaps between the physical and the phenomenal, and the role that phenomenal concepts play in grounding these gaps.  I'd say that every paper in this book is important, and that collectively the papers in the book greatly advance our understanding of these topics.

The first section on the knowledge argument has a number of special treats: Knut Nordby, the achromat color scientist, with a piece on what it's like to be in Mary's situation; Lawrence Nemirow, author of the original defence of the ability hypothesis concerning the knowledge argument, rebutting all the objections to the hypothesis that have sprung up in recent years; Dan Dennett with his "RoboMary" response to the knowledge argument; and an exchange between Frank Jackson and Torin Alter on whether representationalism undermines the knowledge argument (Jackson says yes, Alter no).

The second half of the book has a number of papers right at the leading edge of the debate over phenomenal concepts.  Janet Levin and David Papineau set out definitive versions of their well-known materialist views of phenomenal concepts, including replies to objections.  Joe Levine and I have papers raising problems for any materialist account of phenomenal concepts.  John Hawthorne raises problems for the sort of "direct reference" account of phenomenal concepts that I and many others favor.  Finally, there is a terrific set of three papers on arguments for dualism and the role of phenomenal concepts therein.  Stephen White defends the property dualism argument and Ned Block argues against it, both with a lot of attention to the conceptual foundations.  And Martine Nida-Rümelin has a new and important argument for dualism, one that is based on a two-dimensional analysis but is quite different from the 2-D arguments that I and others have put forward.

The editors are to be congratulated for putting together such a superb book.  I expect that the papers in it will shape much of the debate on these topics in the coming years, and I strongly recommend that anyone interested in these issues take a look at it.

Comments

[charles]

Thanks for the recommendation! Any other new books out there that interested but not particularly well-connected parties might be interested in?

[Paul Raymont]

Charles,

Here are two forthcoming collections that look good:

Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen (Blackwell) ISBN: 1405117613

and

The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider, ISBN: 1405160004

There are descriptions of both at tbe Blackwell Online link: http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/index.jsp

Also, both are available for pre-order at Amazon, although I don't know if they're both on sale there. They are on sale (due perhaps to the rising Canadian dollar) at amazon.ca and chapters.ca

[djc]

Good question. I've been meaning to post here about various other recent books but haven't gotten around to it. At least two other really excellent collections on topics related to consciousness have been published this year: Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne, and Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, edited by Uriah Kriegel and Ken Williford. As for single-authored books, there's Daniel Stoljar's Ignorance and Imagination, about which I've already posted, and Robert Kirk's Zombies and Consciousness, about which I definitely hope to post something before long. Then there's David Rosenthal's long-awaited collection Consciousness and Mind, and a collection by Ned Block that should appear soon. On topics with at least some connection to consciousness, there's also Anil Gupta's Empiricism and Experience, Alvin Goldman's Simulating Minds, and Peter Carruthers' The Architecture of the Mind. As for reference works: apart from the two that Paul mentions, there will also be companions/handbooks to consciousness (in science as well as philosophy) appearing with Cambridge and with Oxford before too long. Also on the scientific side of things, there's Nick Humphrey's Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness, Gerald Edelman's Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, and Stephen Laureys' excellent collection The Boundaries of Consciousness: Neurobiology and Neuropathology. Finally, not on consciousness but on another topic of interest around these parts, the long-awaited collection Two-Dimensional Semantics, edited by Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Josep Macia and with contributions by a number of the leading figures in the area, was published a few months ago.

[Vadim Vasilyev]

David, I would add Blackmore's collection of interviews Conversations on Consciousness. Very useful book, to my mind. Another related collection - The Three Pound Enigma by Shannon Moffett, with Dennett, Koch (discussing your ideas, by the way),and others.

[r.black]

I was wondering about consciousness and sleep, if we nave a consciousness that survives bodily death, what happens to that consciousness when the person is asleep.

[hassan zarei]

Hi david,
i have a silly question. i had a discussion with my friend about your book "on the consciousness" and the problem was that we did not know how to pronounce "chalmers" . is that "chaamers" or "cha l mers"? thanks
ps : i am from iran so it is normal that i cant pronounce it.

[djc]

That's a new question! I think either pronunciation is OK. It's pronounced the same way as the corresponding sound in "Palmer" or "calmer". In my dialect there isn't much trace of the "l" in any of these, so "Chalmers" sounds more like your first option. In some dialects (e.g. some American dialects) the "l" is stronger -- that's fine too.

[hassan zarei]

thank you dave. i have added your blog to my favorite and will follow how you wanna cope with the hard problem. anyway we AI folks are attaking the same problem but in a different way.
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