The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness

Featuring many important updates and revisions, the highly–anticipated second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness offers a collection of readings that together represent the most thorough and comprehensive survey of the nature of consciousness available today. Chapters delve deeply into the wide variety of scientific and philosophical problems that arise from the study of consciousness as well as the philosophical, cognitive, neuroscientific, and phenomenological approaches to solving them.

Along with updates to existing scientific readings reflecting the latest research and data, this edition features 18 entirely new theoretical, empirical, and methodological chapters covering such areas as integrated information theory, the resurgence in panpsychism, the renewed interest in more sophisticated first–person methodologies for the investigation of conscious phenomenology, and many others. Featuring contributions by leading experts in the study of consciousness, from across a variety of academic disciplines, the 54–chapter collection reasserts its role as the most authoritative and up–to–date volume on the subject. Illuminating and thought–provoking, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for those wishing to gain insight into the latest contemporary thinking on consciousness.

Susan Schneider is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, a faculty member in the technology and ethics group at Yale′s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her work is on the nature of the self and mind, which she examines through issues in philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence (A.I.), metaphysics, astrobiology, epistemology, and neuroscience. She is the author of The Language of Thought: a New Philosophical Direction (2011) and Science Fiction and Philosophy, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), and was responsible for the volume′s philosophical content.

Max Velmans is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been involved in consciousness studies for over 40 years. He has over 100 publications on this topic including Understanding Consciousness (2000/2009) and Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017). He is a co–founder and former Chair of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, and was responsible for the volume′s scientific content.