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Subjectivity, Objectivity and Nagel on Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Jeffrey Foss
Jeffrey Foss
Affiliation:
University of Victoria
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Extract

The strong intuition that the facts concerning the subjectivity of consciousness are simply beyond the grasp of objective science is the highest barrier to an intuitively convincing materialism in the philosophy of mind. We are steeped in a tradition which has it that there is, to state it from the first-person point of view, an epistemic difference in principle between my introspectible experience, which only I can apprehend and know, and the things which everyone can apprehend and which form the domain of the natural sciences. This contrast is sometimes cast as that between the subjective stuff of first-person introspectible consciousness and the objective stuff of the natural sciences. In this essay, I will try to budge the view of the subjective-objective distinction which underlies this tradition from its position as tacit dogma.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , Fall 1993 , pp. 725 - 736
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993

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