Uriah Kriegel, “The Sources of Intentionality” (Oxford UP, 2011)
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Thank you very much. Today's interview is with Uriah Kriegel, whose latest book, The Sources of Intentionality, is just out from Oxford University Press. Professor Kriegel is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. It is standard in philosophy of mind to draw a basic distinction between two kinds of mental phenomena, so-called intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about your grandmother or and phenomenal or experiential states, which are typified by such items as feelings of pain or experiences of seeing red or smelling coffee. It's a matter of great debate how to explain either of these kinds of mental phenomena in terms that show exactly how they can be part of a purely physical world.
The approach that has been dominant in recent decades is to try to explain the phenomenology in terms of the intentional. In other words, to explain conscious experience in terms of intentionality and then to explain intentionality in terms of physical relations such as causal relations between thinkers and the items that they are thinking about. However, the nature of consciousness has remained stubbornly resistant to such reductive efforts, at least for some philosophers. In this erudite and stylishly written and provocative volume, filled with suggestive pathways for future research, Professor Kriegel defends a theory that reverses this order of explanatory priority and seeks to explain intentionality in terms of conscious experience.
His arguments draw on significant new work on the nature of consciousness that seek to give it a more central explanatory role than it has been given in understanding the mind. Let's turn to the interview. So I have with me today Uriah Kriegel from the University of Arizona, whose latest book, The Sources of Intentionality, is just out from Oxford University Press. Uriah, are you there?
Hi, Carrie.
Hi, Uriah. How are you doing?
Pretty good. Thank you for inviting me to do this.
Oh, it's my pleasure. It was a great book. I must say I have to compliment you on both the stylishness of the writing as well as the erudition. And there was a lot of very suggestive passages there that, you know, were just from an intellectual point of view, were very kind of inspiring in terms of, huh, you know, this is worth thinking about further. That's cool. Which is always nice, which is always nice. So before we get into the details of your arguments in the sources of intentionality, maybe you could tell us a little bit first about how you came to philosophy, how you came to be interested in philosophy of mind and consciousness in particular, and then finally how you came to the topic of this book.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main focus of the episode and how is it introduced?
0:00–9:12
2
How does Uriah Kriegel describe his personal path into philosophy of mind?
9:12–30:11
3
What is the dominant “naturalizing intentionality” view that Kriegel critiques?
30:11–50:10
4
How does Kriegel define intentionality and distinguish it from phenomenology?
50:10–1:07:07
Speakers
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