013-14 Rice Seminar "Materialism and New Materialism Across the Disciplines": Consciousness in the 20th Century

Friday, March 7, 2014

Speaker: Galen Strawson from University of Reading

There occurred in the twentieth century the most remarkable episode in the history of human thought. A number of thinkers denied the existence of something we know with certainty to exist: consciousness, conscious experience: the subjective qualitative or phenomenological character or being4 of experiences: the experiential ‘what-it’s-likeness’ of experiences: experience, as I’ll call it. Others held back from the Denial, as I’ll call it, but claimed that it might be true—a claim no less remarkable than the Denial. I want to document some aspects of this episode, for my subject is the history of the concept of consciousness in the twentieth century, and the core of that history is the history of the Denial.