James and Consciousness

Abstract

Between 1872 and 1890, William James developed an evolutionary account of phenomenal consciousness. He contended that consciousness enables the active evaluation of what is in (or might be in) one’s environment. James hypothesized that this evaluative capacity was selected (in the Darwinian sense) because it regulated the behavior of vertebrates with highly articulated brains. His hypothesis was intended to explain some surprising results in physiology, particularly a series of experiments purporting to show purposive behavior in (of all things) decapitated frogs. This chapter reconstructs and evaluates James’s evolutionary hypothesis, showing how it would explain those surprising experiments. His account requires interactionist dualism, so he also developed what would become an influential objection to epiphenomenalism: that the latter cannot explain the evolution of our natively patterned, phenomenal pleasures and pains.

Sibling Rivalry, (Dis)Inheritance and Politics in Aphra Behn’s The Younger Brother and Susanna Centlivre’s The Artifice

“…Sir John Freeman, the elder and, in this case, more upright and responsible brother, was disinherited by his father (already deceased at the beginning of the play) for political reasons: motivated by patriotic (Whig) fervor, he had disturbed a meeting organized by a non-juring parson, had driven out the congregation and tied and locked up the priest. Non-jurors were Anglican or (in Scotland) Episcopal clergymen who regarded James II as the legitimate king of the realm, refused to take the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary after James's deposition in the Glorious Revolution, and embraced a policy of nonresistance and Passive Obedience to the established authorities (see Klein 2021). Sir John's father, a Jacobite and member of this cleric's congregation, had thereupon disinherited him in favor of his younger brother Ned, though he could not deprive his elder son of the title, just like Behn's Sir Rowland, whose elder son continues to be Sir Merlin, while the younger brother is just called George Marteen, even when he inherits the estate.…”