One phenomenon pertains roughly to being awake. A person or other creature is conscious when it's awake and mentally responsive to sensory input; otherwise it's unconscious. This kind of consciousness figures most often in everyday discourse.

At the level of our platitudinous background knowledge about things, speech is the expression of thought. And understanding what such expressing involves is central to understanding the relation between thinking and speaking. Part of what it is for a speech act to express a mental state is that the speech act accurately captures the mental state and can convey to others what mental state it is. And for this to occur, the speech act at least must have propositional content that (...) somehow reflects that of the mental state, and perhaps must have other such properties as well. (shrink)

All mental states, including thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations, often occur consciously. But they all occur also without being conscious. So the first thing a theory of consciousness must do is explain the difference between thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations that are conscious and those which are not.

This essay compares and contrasts pragmatic naturalism with the more well known position of epistemological naturalism on several pivotal issues, in the process offering a pragmatic critique of the latter. It highlights their common rejection of both foundationalism and a priori methods and their positive claims that: what needs examination is not our concept of knowledge but knowledge itself; knowledge must be understood as tied to the world and as a natural phenomenon to be examined in its natural setting; the (...) epistemic endeavor involves unifying its three traditional projects of giving an account of what knowledge is, explaining how knowledge is possible, and providing useful epistemic advice, thus involving normative considerations; and the method of gaining knowledge in general is continuous with the method of science. Yet, there are very great divergences between the two naturalisms concerning the answers offered, and these are explored and evaluated in the development of the essay. (shrink)

What is it that we are conscious of when we are conscious of ourselves? Hume famously despaired of finding self, as against simply finding various impressions and ideas, when, as he put it, “I enter most intimately into what I call myself.” “When I turn my reflexion on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions.”.

ABSTRACT Psychological or political criticism of the parent‐child relation presupposes a normative account of that relation. Such an account is here provided. The normative account can shed most light when the parent‐child relation is presented recognizably, not in Utopian disguise. The purposes of reasonable people partly depend on their interpretations of those of their parents. This is so whether such people accept or reject any particular parental purposes. The filial art sticks to the project of working out the enacted interpretation—until (...) it gets it approximately right. There is a corresponding parental art, neither compensatory nor sacrificial. (shrink)

In the last few years, some attempts have been made to overcome the disparity between environmental ethics and business ethics. However, as the situation now stands the various positions in business ethics have not incorporated any well-developed theoretical foundation for environmental issues, and conversely, environmental ethics is failing to capture an audience that could profit greatly from utilizing its theoretical insights and research. In this paper, we attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for business ethics and environmental ethics that (...) can further the dialogue that has recently begun, perhaps bringing it to a deeper theoretical level. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

A revision of the author's thesis, Stuttgart, 1972.