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Abhinavagupta, the hard problem of consciousness, and the moral grounding problem

Loriliai Biernacki The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 264 pp. $83.00 (hc)

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Notes

  1. See Maharaja (2019).

  2. See Lockwood (1989).

  3. See Strawson (2016).

  4. See Vaidya (2022).

  5. See Garfield (2017).

  6. See Vaidya (2022).

  7. See Block (1995).

  8. See Chalmers discussion of vulcans, zombies, and humans in relation to the trolley problem. While Chalmers doesn’t use the phrase sentience but rather the claim that phenomenal consciousness and not affective consciousness is necessary for morality, I use here the distinction between thin and thick notions of sentience, because sentience theory is always tied to some account of consciousness.

  9. On August 26, 2023, at The Conference on Moral Status at Trinity College Dublin organized by Kenneth Silver, Bob Fischer argued that phenomenal consciousness might not even be able to account for a grade of moral status because phenomenal consciousness as understood under global workspace theory and higher-order thought theory, lacks certain explanatory capacities. His arguments went beyond the Gwen Bradford’s arguments against phenomenal consciousness being the ground of moral standing based on objective list theories and desire satisfaction theories, because he challenged the idea that even under hedonism phenomenal consciousness lacks certain explanatory resources for explaining why something is a welfare subject.

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  1. San José State University, San José, CA, USA

    Anand Jayprakash Vaidya

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Vaidya, A.J. Abhinavagupta, the hard problem of consciousness, and the moral grounding problem. Int J Philos Relig 95, 93–101 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09907-3

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