Phenomenality as such, or the qualitative aspect of conscious experience, does not seem to play any significant role in medieval discussions of conscious experiences. It seems that medieval thinkers typically did not think that there would be any special private dimension in conscious experience. Rather, their view was that we normally experience the world as it is, and thus share phenomenally the same experience when perceiving the same object. Thus, in perceiving a white object, the species of whiteness informs the mind of any perceiver in the same qualitative way, and exact description of how the form informs the mind raised much interest. The viewpoint was not, however, subjective in the modern sense, and it did not become a topic of philosophical dispute whether there is a special ‘‘what is it like for a person to be perceiving whiteness.’’
There were, however, elaborate discussions concerning how we experience our mental acts as our own. Do the phenomenal characteristics of mental acts include experiencing the acts as personally one’s own? Do we have consciousness of the unity of the mind? Can the so-called Averroist view that we all share the same intellect be refuted simply through reference to experiential consciousness? These questions did not receive unanimous answers. Generally, medieval authors thought that intellectual understanding is experienced as individually one’s own, although that experience may not reveal an incorporeal soul. Also, although most Latin authors thought that the sensory soul and the intellectual soul are distinct, even metaphysically distinct, it was mostly thought that the subject of sensory perception was experienced to be the same as that of intellectual cognition. The discussion seems to be connected to Avicenna’s insight that the subject of visual perception and the subject of the resulting emotion are experienced to be the same.
Consciousness is about some object. Such intention-ality of consciousness has been one of the main obstacles in twentieth-century projects of naturalizing consciousness. Medieval discussions recognized the intentionality, and aimed at explicating what exactly is it that serves as the object of consciousness, and what the presence of the object to the mind in consciousness amounts to. Representational theories gained little following, while the main thrust was toward direct realism, where the object of consciousness is typically an external real thing that somehow gains presence in thought.
World History
