Consciousness and Meaning

• Part I Philosophy of Language


• Introduction to Part I


• 1: Reference and Propositional Attitudes


• 2: Two Theories of Meaning


• 3: The Semantics of Singular Terms


• 4: Must Beliefs Be Sentences?


• 5: Names in Though


• 6: Truth beyond All Verification


• 7: The Supervenience of Social Meaning on Speaker's Meaning


• Part II Philosophy of Mind


• Introduction to Part II


• 8: Social Content and Psychological Content


• 9: Subjective Intentionality


• 10: Phenomenal States


• 11: Can We Explain Intentionality?


• 12: Elimination versus Nonreductive Physicalism


• 13: Reference from the First Person Perspective


• 14: Transparent Experience and the Availability of Qualia


• 15: Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content

Brian Loar (1939--2014) was a leading philosopher of mind and language. Known as a subtle and elegant thinker, Loar developed a novel solution to the mind-body problem, contributed an influential account of phenomenal states and of phenomenal concepts, and presented what is perhaps the most fully articulated functionalist account of propositional attitudes in Mind and Meaning. Loar received his D.Phil. from Oxford University and taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Southern California, and Rutgers University until he retired in 2009.

Katalin Balog received her Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1998. She taught philosophy at Cornell University, and then Yale University between 1998 and 2010. In 2010 she moved to Rutgers University, Newark, where she is still teaching. Her primary areas of research are the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The problems that interest her most, the nature of consciousness, the self, and free will, lie at their intersection. Her recent work centers on the relationship between our subjective, internal understanding of the mind and the objective, scientific view of the world.

Stephanie Beardman specializes in metaethics and moral psychology. She is interested in diachronic rationality, the nature of practical reasons, and in the relevance of scientific studies to ethics. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and has been an Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Currently she is a Visiting Scholar at New York University.