Description
Book SynopsisWhat is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience--of ''the given''--lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. Montague argues that conscious perception, conscious thought, and conscious emotion each have a distinctive, irreducible kind of phenomenology--what she calls
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Intentionality, phenomenology, consciousness, and content 2: A Brentanian theory of content 3: Awareness of awareness 4: P. F. Strawson's datum 5: Brentanianism, standard representationalism, and Fregean representationalism 6: Perception of physical objects: the phenomenological particularity fact 7: Perception of physical objects: the access problem 8: Cognitive phenomenology: what is given in conscious thought 9: Evaluative phenomenology: what is given in conscious emotion Concluding remarks
