ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections among consciousness, intentionality, and knowledge from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology, and in doing so provides a response to the “zombie challenge” discussed by Declan Smithies. According to the zombie challenge, consciousness does not play an important role in the life of the mind, largely because our intentional life can proceed without it. This chapter argues that if Husserl’s views are right, one cannot provide an account of intentionality without appealing to knowledge, and that one cannot provide an account of knowledge without appealing to consciousness (see de Warren 2009, 21–23 for a helpful overview). The chapter also argues that conscious experiences have certain features essentially – such as being either intuitively filled or empty – and that these features entail that they are conscious. I will, finally, consider and respond to Jack Lyons’s reliabilist arguments against the sort of view defended here.
