ABSTRACT
This chapter considers many issues on consciousness in seventeenth century philosophy: intentionality or the object-directedness of mental states, sensory versus intellectual awareness, and the role of ideas in perception and cognition. It distinguishes the problem of consciousness from the problem of self-consciousness. Descartes's achievement in the Second Meditation is to direct the reader's attention to the indubitable presence constituted by the contents of the mind, that is consciousness itself. Cartesians like Antoine Arnauld, following their philosophical master, focus on consciousness solely as a mental phenomenon, something belonging to the human mind independently of what may or may not be happening in the human body. There is some highly suggestive evidence that Benedict de Spinoza sees the ideas-of-ideas doctrine as an account of consciousness. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz explicitly claims, that not all perceptions in a monad – including those in the human mind – are conscious states.
