Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

What is it like to be a human? It is about having experiences, and having those experiences be like something for me. Dan Zahavi, of the University of Copenhagen, has written this: Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood. It has been posted on the web, and will soon see hardcover existence in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Zahavi revisits a by now familiar thought experiment in philosophy, asking himself what it is like to be a bat? He stipulates that to be a bat is for phenomena to have a "what is it like FOR ME" aspect to the bat as a "me." The bat never experiences a blue sky. Does the bat experience the dampness of the cave? It he aware of the relative dryness of certain corners of his cave versus the extra dampness of others? And is that a for-me experience for a bat to have? What about anguish? My guess: a bat probably does have a subjective sense of relative dryness. Probably not an experience of anguish. The former wo...

Rene Descartes believed that only humans have souls. Thus, only humans are capable of thought: animals are entirely mechanical. When you think that your dog is thinking, then, you are actually just confused by the marvelous intricacy of the machinery. I used to think that this was a rather straight-forward idea. There would be times when I thought it idiotic and times when I thought it represented a fairly subtle sort of mistake: but in either mood I thought it easily enough grasped. It was, as Descartes himself said of ideas he approved, "clear and distinct." But recently I encountered an article by John Cottingham that persuades me that getting right what Descartes has to say about animals is a bit complicated. There are ambiguities here. I should confess here that the Cottingham article is no very new contribution to scholarship. It was published in 1978, and has evaded my attention until this week. Still ... here we are.  In Part V of RD's DISCOURSE he ex...