Barry Dainton’s controversial and highly original Stream of Consciousness aroused considerable interest when it was first published. This new paperback edition includes a postscript in which Dainton responds to some of his critics.
Despite the recent upsurge of interest in consciousness, most of this has been focused on the relationship between consciousness and the brain. This has meant that significant and intriguing questions concerning the fundamental characteristics of consciousness itself have not received the attention they deserve. Stream of Consciousness is devoted to these questions by presenting a systematic, phenomenological inquiry into the most general features of conscious life: the nature of awareness, introspection, phenomenal space and time-consciousness. Barry Dainton shows us that a stream of consciousness is not a mosiac of discrete fragments of experience, but rather an interconnected flowing whole.
This compelling discussion about the structure of consciousness will interest anyone concerned with current debates on consciousness in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.