States of Consciousness
The Pulses of Experience

Combining scholarship across psychology, philosophy and cognate fields, Natsoulas highlights surprising connections between the works of leading theorists of consciousness.

Thomas Natsoulas (Author)

9781107083509, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 January 2018

452 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.77 kg

'Thomas Natsoulas has written widely on consciousness with a psychologist's eye to philosophical themes. In States of Consciousness Natsoulas offers a running dialogue with historically significant thinkers. He debates subtle features of inner awareness with Franz Brentano, William James, Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, Gustav Bergmann, J. J. Gibson, Brian O'Shaughnessy, and Galen Strawson. The give-and-take is equally instructive to the psychologist, phenomenologist, philosopher of mind, and cognitive neuroscientist. Interacting with each of these research perspectives, Natsoulas shows in effect how Brentano's conception of inner consciousness remains absolutely crucial to our understanding of human consciousness, even as its exact character is in debate.' David Woodruff Smith, University of California, Irvine

States of Consciousness extends Thomas Natsoulas' development of the psychology of consciousness by giving sustained attention to the stream of consciousness and its component 'pulses of experience'. Natsoulas' unrivalled scholarship across psychology, philosophy and cognate fields means that very often surprising connections are made between the works of leading theorists of consciousness, including Brentano, Mead, Bergmann, Strawson, James, Freud, Skinner, Hebb, Gibson, O'Shaughnessy and Woodruff Smith. At a time when interest in consciousness and the brain is growing rapidly, this book provides an in-depth analysis of sophisticated psychological accounts that pertain to consciousness. Its breadth of coverage and interdisciplinary nature will be of interest to postgraduates and specialists in a range of fields, particularly the history of psychology and philosophy of mind.

1. Introduction: conscious mental phenomena
2. A revisioning of the stream of consciousness
3. The psychical apparatus
4. Radical behaviorism
5. Consciousness denied
6. Psychophysiological parallelism
7. On the sensory-perceptual experiencing one has of things
8. A theorist of 'the attention'
9. Conclusion: against disjunction.

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