Consciousness and Perceptual Experience
An Ecological and Phenomenological Approach

An unusual study of human perceiving from the perspective of an ecological psychology that explicitly incorporates a phenomenology of consciousness.

Thomas Natsoulas (Author)

9781107004511, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 July 2013

468 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 3 cm, 0.8 kg

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors.

1. Introduction: concepts of consciousness
2. Skepticism regarding consciousness
3. The normal waking state
4. Contact with the world
5. Environment
6. The life-world
7. Perceptual content
8. Experiential presence
9. Viewing
10. Inner awareness
11. Conclusion: against virtual objects.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Psychology [JM], Philosophy of mind [HPM]