22 February: Marta Jorba (Basque Country) — “The Temporality of Conscious Thought”
Sala Enzo Paci, Via Festa del Perdono 7, h. 15:00-17:00.
Abstract: When it comes to the ontology of our minds, one relevant question is the temporal structure of mental episodes. It has been claimed that having a specific temporal structure, namely, being processive, is a condition for something to be part of the stream of consciousness. On this ground, some authors have argued that thought is excluded from the stream and thus that it cannot be the bearer of the relevant phenomenology, i.e., cognitive phenomenology. Against this view, I present an account in which some forms of thought do meet the temporal requirement, when properly understood, and so can be the bearers of cognitive phenomenology. The account sheds light on the different ontological profiles that thought can have, thus contributing to the examination of the structure of consciousness more broadly, and also questions a fundamental asymmetry between the perceptual and the cognitive domain with respect to their temporal structure.