Data di Pubblicazione:
2019
Citazione:
STRUCTURE OF PHENOMENALLY INTENTIONAL STATES / D. Vitasovic ; supervisors: C. Sinigaglia, G. Torrengo. Università degli Studi di Milano, 2019 Dec 20. 31. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2019. [10.13130/vitasovic-daria_phd2019-12-20].
Abstract:
Philosophy of mind has been concerned, one might even say dwell, with the mind – body problem since the ancient times. Although, present-day, we speak of the mind – brain problem, consciousness studies within philosophy are still mostly engaged within this debate. However, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness does not yield and remains to be hard. On the other hand, it still is the problem our attention should be focused on. How does one reconcile this imbalance? Perhaps with a slight shift in methodology. Put the discussion of the structure of the relation between phenomenological and physical in the background and focus on the structure of phenomenology itself. This dissertation is precisely an attempt at that – it concerns the structure of phenomenally intentional mental states. These are mental states that exhibit, primarily, the phenomenal consciousness, the felt, subjective, or ‘what it is like’ (Nagel, 1974) aspect of mental life. They also exhibit the intentional directedness; they are directed or “of” something. Until recently these two features were for the most part unreconciled. Paradigmatically intentional mental states, such as beliefs and thoughts, were not considered to be phenomenal. Vice versa – paradigmatically phenomenal mental states, such as feeling and sensations, were not considered to be intentional (although perception is possibly the one exception, being a mental state that is traditionally seen as phenomenal and intentional), were not considered to be intentional. I advocate a view according to which all intentional mental states are phenomenal, or at least, partly depend on phenomenology.
There are, I believe, five marks of the mental (in no particular order): consciousness, intentionality, phenomenology, subjectivity, and temporality. I discuss each of them in this dissertation. As is evident by now and which I aim to further clarify, I do not take these terms necessarily to refer to the same underlying phenomena.
My aim in this dissertation is to touch upon each of the five ‘marks of the mental’. The dissertation, formed as a collection of papers, starts by introducing a novel theory of modes or attitudes in ‘Intentional Primitivism of Modes’. Here I defend the idea that phenomenally intentional mental states, as defined above, are not individuated only by content, but also by mode. Both variables need to be fixed in order to fix the nature of a conscious mental state. My theory differs from other intentional primitivist theories of modes in that the modes are intrinsically differentiated, as opposed to relational (Crane, 2001; 2003) or simply qualitative (Block, 1978; 1994; 2007). That is to say, modes do not get their intentional character through relational properties to the intentional object, nor are they simply qualitatively defined as such mode as opposed to another. Rather modes are inherently intentional. I distinguish two ways of experiencing modes; a coarse-grained and a fine-grained, and put forward a new metaphysical model, the modifiers model, based on non-representational features of mental states that make a difference to how the occurrent mental state is given to us in experience. I explain the relation between mode and modifier as a genus – specie relation. For example, desperately desiring is composed of the property of desire, the mode, and an independent modifier of desperation. This, as a result, makes my theory adverbialist, however only at a single level, namely, at the level of modes or attitudes, and as such I avoid the main issues of adverbialism. Lastly, I give the metaphysical underpinning of modes in terms of trope theory of modes.
However, this is not to say that all modes or attitudes are per se intentional. Hence, in the second pa
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
Mentality; Consciousness; Intentionality; Phenomenology; Subjectivity; Temporality
Elenco autori:
D. Vitasovic
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