Twenty Thinkers in Mind and Consciousness

TWENTY CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS

David Chalmers’ Online Papers on Consciousness and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography are a valuable resource in the philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. I thought to provide a short list of essential works that would define the essence and program in these fields. This would be valuable as an introduction and to individuals with limited time - for example, persons who wanted to study the topics in relation to some other main interest

The following list is preliminary. Factors in selection are availability online, balance between the past and the present, work that defines the fields and my personal inclinations. Limitation to ten works seemed an impossible task; limitation to twenty is challenging. I regret not yet including anything from Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant…or from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Husserl...or Fodor or Chomsky. I plan to revise the list but I am not yet sure I can achieve the goal of covering what is essential.

1. Aristotle’s Metaphysics

2. Baars, Bernard J. [1998]. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 1988-1998, Electronic version published by the author

3. Bhagavad Gitâ. On the Reality of Action

4. Brentano, Franz Clemens [1874]. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte

5. Broad, C. D. [1925]. Mind and Its Place in Nature

6. Chalmers, David [1996]. The Conscious Mind

7. Edelman, Gerald [1992]. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind

8. Freud, Sigmund [1920-1]. General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, Eng. Trans

9. Heidegger, Martin [1927]. Sein u. Zeit

10. Hundert, Edward M. [1989]. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Neuroscience: A Synthetic Analysis of The Varieties of Human Experience

11. Hegel, G. W. F. [1807]. Phenomenology of the Spirit

12. McGinn, Colin [1991]. The Problem of Consciousness

13. Nagel, Thomas [1998]. Conceiving the Impossible: The Mind-Body Problem

14. Plato’s Parmenides: The Theory of Ideas

15. Penrose, Roger [1994]. Shadows of The Mind: A Search For The Missing Science of Consciousness

16. Searle, John R. [1992]. The Rediscovery Of The Mind. See: Thomas Nagel, [ March 1993] The Mind Wins, a Review of Searle’s book in New York Review of Books

17. Searle, John R. [1997]. The Mystery of Consciousness

18. Searle, John R. [1998]. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in The Real World

19. Upanishad. On the Identity of the Objective and Subjective Universes

20. Whitehead, Alfred North [1929]. Process and Reality

Philosophy of Mind