Jean-Paul Sartre and the HOT Theory of Consciousness

Rocco J. Gennaro Indiana State University [final version in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2002] Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness entails self-consciousness, or, even more strongly, that consciousness is self-consciousness. As Kathleen Wider puts it in her terrific book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, “...all consciousness is, by its very nature, self-consciousness.” 1 I share this view with Sartre and have elsewhere argued for it at length. 2 My overall aim in this paper is to examine Sartre‟s theory of consciousness against the background of the so-called "higher-order thought theory of consciousness" (the HOT theory) which, in turn, will shed light on the structure of conscious mental states as well as on Sartre‟s theory of (self-) consciousness and reflection. Another goal of this paper is, following Wider, to show how Sartre‟s views can be understood from a contemporary analytic perspective. Sartre‟s theory of consciousness is often confusing to the socalled “analytic Anglo-American” tradition, but I attempt to show how this obstacle can be overcome against the backdrop of a specific contemporary theory of consciousness. In section one I explain some key Sartrean terminology and in section two I introduce the HOT theory. Section three is where I argue for the close connection between Sartre‟s theory and