Speaker Series Talk: Alison Simmons (Harvard)

“Cartesian Consciousness Reconsidered”

Chapel Hill Philosophy Speaker Series Talk by Alison Simmons(Harvard).

Descartes (in)famously revolutionized our conception of the mind by identifying consciousness as the mark of the mental:  all and only thoughts are conscious.  Today the idea that all thoughts are conscious sees hopelessly naïve or blindly dogmatic.  Empirical psychologists, psychiatrists, and zombie-loving philosophers all embrace the existence, or at least the possibility, of unconscious thoughts.  But Descartes faces a problem more serious than being snubbed by today’s intellectuals:  in his own work on the mind, Descartes himself seems to posit a whole host of unconscious thoughts.  Something is not as it seems.  Either Descartes is remarkably inconsistent, or his claim that all thought is conscious is more nuanced than it appears.  In this paper I argue that while Descartes was indeed unwavering in his commitment to the conscious mark, he distinguished different types and degrees of consciousness that make for a rather rich cognitive psychology, one that is capable of accommodating a range of phenomena that others might be tempted to identify as unconscious.