Canadian Journal of Philosophy
March 1, 2003
Uriah Kriegel
190 citations
The word 'consciousness' is ambiguous because it is used in many everyday contexts rather than as a precise technical term. To address this, the author introduces a specific technical concept: intransitive self-consciousness, a form of self-awareness. The paper then discusses this particular sense of consciousness, distinguishing it from other meanings.
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
February 1, 2014
Mohan Matthen
33 citations
A review of Hutto and Myin's Radicalizing Enactivism challenges the adequacy of a non-representational theory of mind. It argues that such a theory cannot distinguish cognition from other bodily engagements like wrestling. It questions whether simple robots by Rodney Brooks adequately model multimodal organisms. Finally, it contends that Hutto and Myin neglect how semantically interacting representations are necessary to explain choice and action.
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
April 1, 2025
Claudi Brink
A philosophical paper examines Matthew Boyle's account of prereflective self-awareness from his book Transparency and Reflection, which links self-consciousness to rationality through a Sartrean lens rather than standard Kantian interpretations. The author argues that Boyle's framework offers tools for reinterpreting Kant's claim that the "I think" must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. However, the author contends that Boyle's model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant's own account, understood as a kind of prereflective consciousness, has resources to address this challenge.
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
June 30, 2025
Jen Semler
Phenomenal consciousness is not a necessary condition for moral agency. The paper argues that an entity can instantiate four key capacities—action, moral concept possession, responsiveness to moral reasons, and moral understanding—without being conscious. It defends a picture of nonconscious moral agency as a plausible account of an entity that can act for moral reasons and be morally responsible, and discusses broader implications, especially for the possibility of artificial moral agency.