Consciousness, Unconsciousness, and Intentionality

Abstract

One of the most amazing things about the past half century or so in analytic philosophy of mind is the scarcity of serious work on the nature of consciousness. Even works purportedly about consciousness have very little to say about the general structure of consciousness or about its special features. Thus for example of three recent books containing Consciousness1 in their titles not one contains even an attempt to state a comprehensive account of the structure of conscious states, much less state a general theory that will account for subjectivity, the stream of consciousness, the qualitative character of conscious states, etc. In each case consciousness is regarded not as a primary subject matter in the philosophy of mind but as a problem, a potential embarrassment to the author's theory, which is,