Abstract

There is widespread agreement among many contemporary philosophers of mind that, in addition to their qualitative character, phenomenally conscious states contain some kind of subjective character. The subjective character of experience is most commonly characterized as a subject’s awareness that it is currently undergoing a specific experience. This idea is nothing new, of course, and something similar has been proposed quite some time ago by Franz Brentano, among others, under the name of “secondary consciousness”. That fact hasn’t remained unnoticed. Indeed, a number of competing contemporary accounts of subjective character refer to Brentano as an early proponent of their particular view. This article pursues two objectives. First, it argues that the so-called self-mode account of subjective character is, for systematical reasons, superior to self-representational and pre-reflective accounts. Second, the article briefly suggests a novel interpretation of Brentano’s concept of secondary consciousness that sets it in relation to the previously introduced self-mode account and bears some similarities with Thomasson’s adverbial interpretation of Brentano’s concept of secondary consciousness.