Consciousness

Abstract

Medieval discussions recognize many of the issues that are nowadays associated with the philosophical term “consciousness,” but the conceptual schemes used in these discussions are very different from the modern ones. Thus, the modern interest in consciousness and self-consciousness relates to medieval interest in perception, conceptual representation, attention, and self-knowledge. The phenomenality of conscious thought was not directly addressed. The medieval theories of self-cognition distinguish between knowledge of the essence of the soul and the acts of the soul. For the former, opinions varied so that the Platonic thinkers often affirmed that the essence of the soul can be directly perceived while the Aristotelians claimed that such perception is indirect. Knowledge of the existence of one’s own soul was often given as an example of a certainty. Medieval authors generally agreed that acts of one’s own soul can be self-consciously perceived, but opinions differed in respect to how such self-conscious thought is structured and whether all mental acts are actually perceived, or whether all thought is self-conscious.