A starting point for consciousness research: Reply to Thomas Schmidt

Anesthesia research has focused on showing learning in the absence of awareness for good practical reasons. Crucially, continued learning during otherwise clinically adequate anesthesia may affect patients’ well-being on recovery. Theoretically, preserved perceptual priming during anesthesia offers a useful starting point for consciousness research by determining the limits of memory function during minimal (if not absent) consciousness. The big question for consciousness research is not to demonstrate absolutely unconscious processing, but rather to map out the cognitive and neurobiological processes that enable conscious experience itself.     

Thomas vs. Thomas: A New Approach to Nagel's Bat Argument

In this paper I examine Thomas Nagel's familiar challenge to physicalism. Nagel famously uses his vivid example about the sensory apparatus of bats to illustrate the difficulty of providing a purely physical characterization of phenomenal experience. Adapting Thomas Aquinas's principle regarding the nature of divine omnipotence, I argue that the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat does not threaten physicalism.     

Kierkegaard's Critique of Eudaimonism: A Reassessment

Interpreters are less univocal than one might think in assessing Søren Kierkegaard's attitude toward eudaimonism. Through an analysis of several key texts from across Kierkegaard's authorship, I argue that existing interpretations do not convincingly address the relationship between Kierkegaard's critique of eudaimonism and his mid‐nineteenth‐century context, which was dominated by post‐Kantian idealists. While I am sympathetic to aspects of deontological and aretaic interpretations, a contextual reading shows that his critique centers on what he diagnoses as the enclosure of the modern self. This puts his critique of eudaimonism in the purview of his moral psychology and in continuity with his critique of romanticism.     

Thomas J. Sweeney: A Visionary Leader and Advocate for the Counseling Profession

The contributions of Thomas J. Sweeney to the counseling profession through professional leadership and advocacy, scholarship, teaching, and the development of Chi Sigma Iota are chronicled through a personal interview and comments from professional colleagues. Readers are provided with a sense of the depth and breadth of his more than 50 years of dedicated service.