Forthcoming in The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophical Humanism of Raymond Tallis, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter reconstructs and critically assesses Raymond Tallis’ critique of scientific naturalist accounts of consciousness, which for all their diversity share a basic commitment to explaining consciousness by reifying it. My aim is to bolster Tallis’ critique of naturalism by drawing on the theoretical resources of Husserlian phenomenology. I reconstruct Tallis’ argument that consciousness, as the condition of possibility for explicitness, cannot be explained with reference to empirical objects and their causal relations. I show that this Tallisian argument structurally parallels Husserlian arguments for the explanatory primacy of consciousness understood as the condition for the intelligibility of objects. I then show that in spite of Tallis’ advance over naturalist accounts, he maintains a residual, problematic objectivism insofar as he, too, ultimately looks to the mode of being of objects when identifying the principles for the individuation of conscious subjects. I argue that this residual objectivism leads Tallis into the circularity of individuating consciousness, the condition of possibility for explicit things, by referencing an explicit thing: the body, understood as an object in space. In contrast, I argue that the principle for the individuation of the subject is the self-constitution of internal time consciousness as described by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I conclude that to resolve this circularity and bolster his anti-naturalist position, which sees consciousness as not only epistemically foundational but also as ontologically irreducible in a way that is inconsistent with scientific naturalism, Tallis would benefit from more explicitly engaging with transcendental phenomenology.
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