Jakub Mihálik: Inner Awareness, Intimacy, and Acquaintance

Organized by the Department for the Study of Early Modern Rationality and by the Department of Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, CAS

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Invitation pdf

Abstract
Brentano’s idea that our conscious states constitutively involve ‘inner awareness’ has resonated in the debates concerning phenomenal consciousness and its subjectivity (see Rosenthal, Kriegel, Williford, Levine, Giustina, etc.). Here inner awareness is a special sort of awareness that makes us aware of some of our mental states, thus rendering these states phenomenally conscious, so that – to use Thomas Nagel’s phrase – there’s something it’s like for us to undergo these states. I’ll explain that the apparent intimacy and immediacy of inner awareness gives us good reason to reject the orthodox representationalist construal of inner awareness (e.g. Kriegel, Rosenthal, Weisberg) and examine non-representationalist alternatives.