Concrete consciousness: A Sartrean critique of functionalist accounts of mind

In this essay, I argue that Sartre's notion of pre-reflective consciousness can be summoned to offer a general challenge to contemporary functionalist accounts of mind, broadly construed. In virtue of the challenge Sartre offers these contemporary functionalist accounts and the richness of his phenomenological analysis, I conclude that his voice needs to be included in ongoing debates over the nature of consciousness. First, I look at some of the basic claims motivating functionalist accounts of mind. Next, I look at Sartre's notion of pre-reflective consciousness and discuss how this notion challenges functionalist accounts of mentality. I conclude by suggesting that Sartre's rendering of pre-reflective consciousness remains overly cognitivist. I show how this notion can be deepened to include the sensory-motor capacities of the situated body—resulting in a pre-reflective bodily self-awareness—and how this deepened formulation offers a further challenge to functionalist accounts of mind

Teaching Matters, Volume 2: Essays by the faculty and staff at the University of Maine at Farmington

Essays by the faculty and staff at the University of Maine at Farmington.https://scholarworks.umf.maine.edu/publications/1087/thumbnail.jp

Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this recordA family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. Despite much interest in this topic, however, it has not found its way to philosophy of psychiatry in a substantive way. I here consider how these “scaffolded” approaches to mind and self might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. First, I introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding”. I distinguish three forms of affective scaffolding and support this taxonomy by appealing to different sources of empirical work. Second, I put the idea of affective scaffolding to work. Using schizophrenia as a case study, I argue — along with others in phenomenological psychopathology — that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude that this way of thinking about the scaffolded self is potentially transformative both for our theoretical as well as practical understanding of the causes and character of schizophrenic experience, insofar as it suggests the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment