The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

In this work, Kathleen V. Wider discusses Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of consciousness in Being and Nothingness in light of recent work by analytic philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. She brings together phenomenological and scientific understandings of the nature of consciousness and argues that the two approaches can strengthen and suppport each other. Work on consciousness from two very different philosophical traditions―the continental and analytic―contributes to her explanation of the deep-seated intuition that all consciousness is self-consciousness.