Consciousness as knowingness

Monist

Volumn 91, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 237-249

  McGinn, Colin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949384384     PISSN: 00269662     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/monist20089123     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint; reprinted in David Chalmers, ed., Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 481
2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1967; first published 1911), p. 25
3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958)
4. I discuss these various types of knowledge, and their interrelations, in "The Concept of Knowledge," reprinted in McGinn, Knowledge and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
5. See my "The Objects of Intentionality," in Consciousness and its Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), for a defense of non-existent (intentional) objects. In my view, we can have knowledge of non-existent objects in just the way we do of existent objects, both by acquaintance knowledge and propositional knowledge
6. I discuss this in "The Appearance of Colour," in Knowledge and Reality (cited in n. 6 above). Others have had the same view
7. Frege makes this point in "Thought," in The Frege Reader, ed. Michael Beaney (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), p. 339f, where he denies that the self that has ideas could itself be an idea
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1969), translated by Hazel Barnes. In Sartrean language, the epistemic thesis says that the for-itself is a being such that in its being the being of the in-itself is known
9. Russell enunciates this principle in The Problems of Philosophy (cited in n. 2, above), p. 32
10. This sounds like Donald Davidson on the principle of charity and its epistemological implications, but it is actually very different. I am not suggesting that most of our beliefs must count as knowledge, only that knowledge of things by acquaintance can survive skepticism about our propositional knowledge. I discuss Davidson's thesis in "Radical Interpretation and Epistemology," in Knowledge and Reality (cited in n. 6, above)