Consciousness and Meaning

One of the most important problems of modern philosophy concerns the place of subjectivity in a purely physical universe. Brian Loar was a major contributor to the discussion of this problem for over four decades. This volume brings together his most important and influential essays in the philosophy of language and of mind.

Brian Loar was a leading philosopher of mind and language for over forty years. 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 PhD 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; a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis; and the recipient of a Time-Out Grant from Vassar College. Currently she is a Visiting Scholar at New York University.

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