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forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780198872924
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 03 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This volume is a collection of new work on the significance of consciousness: in what ways does conscious experience matter, and why? Many have thought that consciousness is not merely a theoretically puzzling phenomenon, but that it is important morally, epistemically, or in other ways. For example, this is a key reason why people care how consciousness is distributed: do animals, insects or even near future AIs have it? But in what sense (if at all) is this true, and why? And how does this relate to our view of what consciousness is? Do different theories of consciousness have different implications for how it matters? Does the view that consciousness reduces to a physical state of the brain imply that it does not matter in the way we think it does?
The Importance of Being Conscious brings together a variety of perspectives on these questions from leading theorists in ethics and philosophy of mind.
Geoffrey Lee received his Ph.D from New York University in 2009. His research focuses on foundational questions about perception and consciousness. Lee is currently working on a new book about the philosophy and science of consciousness called The Search for the Inner Light: Finding Consciousness in a Material World.
Adam Pautz received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2004. He first taught at the University of Texas at Austin and since 2015 has been Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. Pautz works on traditional "big questions" about mind and nature by using a mix of empirically-informed arguments and "armchair" arguments. Alongside Daniel Stoljar, Pautz edited the collection Blockheads! (2019). Pautz is also the author of Perception (2021).
