ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a certain problem in the treatment of conscious experience over the last several decades in the analytic tradition, and suggest that certain basic ideas that have their source, in Sartre's account of consciousness in Being and Nothingness might point the way toward a solution. Ned Block, an American philosopher has famously distinguished between two notions of consciousness namely access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Perhaps the most straightforward way to capture the idea of an occurrently subjective feature of conscious experience is to posit a secondary awareness as intimately tied to the primary awareness involved in any conscious experience. The fundamental distinction in the Sartrean framework that defines the For-Itself approach is that between the in-itself and the for-itself. Higher-order theory (HOT) is unabashedly reductive. Conscious experiences are not merely instantiations of phenomenal properties, but rather inherently intentional and subjective relations of a particular, ontologically fundamental kind.
