Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and how it Shapes Consciousness - Hardcover

Watzl, Sebastian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199658420 ISBN 13: 9780199658428

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.

About this title

About the Author

Sebastian Watzl, Associate Professor, University of Oslo

Sebastian Watzl holds an MA in biology from Humboldt University (Berlin), and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University (New York). After postdoctorates at Harvard's Mind-Brain-Behavior Interfaculty Inititative (MBB) and the University of Oslo's Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), he is now Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Oslo. Sebastian has published on many aspects of attention, perception, and consciousness, and is currently leading 'Thought and Sense', a research project on the relationship between perception and cognition.

Review

"What is attention? What is its role in consciousness? Watzl's book answers these questions with a simple idea: Attention structures the mind. The idea is fleshed out in this ambitious two-part work, the first providing a metaphysics of attention as an activity of ordering the mind in terms of priority, the second providing a conception of attention as organizing consciousness by centering the conscious field. Watzl has thought deeply about these issues, and the results are carefully explicated in this compelling and complex book. It provides the most comprehensive philosophical discussion of the functional and phenomenal aspects of attention currently available in monograph form." -- Wayne Wu, Mind

"On my reading, Watzl's book stands out from recent books in the field thanks to his engagement with broader work in philosophy. While interdisciplinary, his book is also deeply "inter-sub-disciplinary" (to use a hefty term from Ralph Wedgwood). Watzl makes informed and insightful use of work from not just cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, but also metaphysics, ontology, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of language. Further, he engages with work outside the analytic tradition in Western philosophy, including Sartre, Husserl, and the Husserlian Gurwitsch... Watzl's unifying and systematic approach stands out for its ambition." -- Nicholas Silins, Notre Dame Philosophical Review

"This book is a welcome contribution to a better understanding of the matter; not only because of the specific data and insights it gathers, but even more for the common assumptions it questions from the available literature. ... Watzl provides a rigorous philosophical analysis that professionals from various disciplines may find useful as well. ... the topic itself, the information available and the approach to the problem will be appreciated by researchers, clinicians and people from a general philosophical background."--Aline Maya Paredes, Metapsychology Online Reviews

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0199658420
• ISBN 13: 9780199658428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336