Barron and Klein (1) define consciousness very narrowly, excluding most of the attributes commonly associated with it (e.g., self-awareness). By limiting the definition to a form of information processing, they find that insects qualify. However, just to put this conclusion in perspective, by the same definition, some robots are also conscious and capable of subjective experience. Autonomous, s...

noted the shift by left-wing and union-linked intellectuals from socialism to social democracy, and the claim by these theorists that 'Marxism is not voluntarily accepted by the working class'. Their experience (the abstract told us) was very different On the basis of correspondence to Learning Nation and of fieldwork, they argued that 'the working class wants socialism and recognises the need ...

The publication in 1923 of Georg Lukács’s foundational History and Class Consciousness is approaching its centenary. Arising from high revolutionary passion, this book faces bleak prospects a hundred years on. After much influence and attention, western Marxism-and broadly speaking, the western Left-likewise has declined since at least 1968. Perry Anderson, the leading philosophical exponent of...

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. The primary purpose is to revisit Ned Block’s distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. The secondary purpose is to examine key case studies from consciousness research in the cognitive sciences. Block has argued that what he calls phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are completely independent phenomena, and that...

When E. P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class he sought to produce a history of people enmeshed in a struggle for self-determination and selfrealization against great opposition. His was not a work of abstraction. It described real individuals in real situations and placed them all in a context rich enough to make the book accessible to the working-class people of his own da...

The publication in 1923 of Georg Lukács’s foundational History and Class Consciousness is approaching its centenary. Arising from high revolutionary passion, this book faces bleak prospects a hundred years on. After much influence and attention, western Marxism-and broadly speaking, the western Left-likewise has declined since at least 1968. Perry Anderson, the leading philosophical exponent of...

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts...

and indeEmite categories of social theory" (p. 151), by considering consumption and exchange as well as production, symbolic capital as well as material capital, and the particular patterns of new social movements and resistance in the symbolic as well as the material world. There is much to argue about in these challenging views. Kearney is weakest at tying gender oppression and feminist movem...

Benguigui used the term “middle class” in a way that suggested it exerted signifi-cant social agency in contemporary Tonga (1989). My review of his analysis con-cludes that there is no coherent, durable middle class in Tonga capable of theeffective class action he claimed for it. Instead, the social struggles of recentdecades, typically led by members of commoner educated elites...

MORRIS DICKSTEIN POSES his recent study of post–World War II American fiction Leopards in the Temple (2002) as a corrective to the by now standard tendency to emphasize the cold war in accounts of this period. But while Dickstein takes the critics of cold war culture to task for what he sees as their oversimplification of both art and politics, he concurs with them on at least one major point. ...