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Any system with the basic package is a decider; any decider with directly active perceptual information has the ‘basic package-plus’ and is a ‘decider-plus’. This chapter argues that being a decider-plus is logically sufficient for perceptual consciousness. First, on the provisional assumption that the basic package-plus includes all the purely functional conditions necessary for perceptual-phenomenal consciousness, the sole-pictures argument of Chapter 4 is extended to cover any decider-plus, not just zombies; then that assumption is defended. No merely natural or nomological or brute necessity has to be invoked. Among numerous likely objections discussed are those relating to blindsight; automatism; the usual objections to functionalist accounts of consciousness; the ‘explanatory gap’; and Carruthers’s critique of rival accounts to his own.

The main alternative accounts of perceptual consciousness are briefly discussed, including scientific-psychological; neuroscientific; dualist; physicalist; Wittgensteinian; Sartrean; behaviourist; other kinds of functionalist; pure representationalist (Dretske, Tye); higher-order perception (Armstrong); higher-order thought (Rosenthal, Carruthers). The book concludes with a reminder of its core points.

This chapter examines the interactions of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, both with each other and with those who mediated the Cuba Libre project. In December 1948, the Ward Ritchie Press of Los Angeles released Cuba Libre: Poems by Nicolás Guillén in a limited edition of 250 copies. Cuba Libre, the first book-length edition of Guillén's poetry in English, consisted of fifty poems in translations by Hughes and Ben Frederic Carruthers. It is an important example of intercultural translational commerce between Cuba and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on what gets lost and added in the Cuba Libre project, first by analyzing the effects of cultural homogeneity that English-language translations of African diasporic texts published in the United States have tended to create. It considers poems not only from Cuba Libre but also from the anthology Poetry of the Negro 1746–1949.

This chapter introduces the key axes of contestation over the rules of the game in the cotton trade and outlines a theoretical framework to understand them. A new approach to governance in the global economy is proposed: a theory of institutional change within the global capitalist system. This framework builds on recent variants of institutionalism by Djelic, Quack, Carruthers, Halliday, Mahoney, Thelen, Streeck, and others that focus on incremental yet transformational institutional change but demonstrates the limits of these accounts in their treatment of power and conflict. Drawing on the institutional political economic approaches of Polanyi, Wallerstein, Arrighi, and others, the chapter argues that institutional change must be understood in relation to historically specific institutional and systemic power relations. As coalitions of powerful firms and states create institutions to expand the scale and scope of the global economy, they unleash new competitive dynamics that both give rise to new rivals that seek to wrest control of these institutions and generate marginalized actors that seek to challenge their destructive effects. Rivals, marginalized actors, and dominant actors develop distinct strategies to reconstitute existing institutions given their particular positions within broader patterns of capital accumulation. This conflict-driven process generates incremental change and hybrid institutions.

This chapter asks whether an indirect duty view and, in particular, one based on virtue ethics, can provide an acceptable degree of protection for animals. It is argued that there is some scope for arguing that animals can gain indirectly as a result of human concerns, such as the environmental effects of intensive animal agriculture. It is undoubtedly true, though, that indirect duty views have offered very little for animals in the way they have been usually framed. However, it is argued in this chapter that indirect duty views about animals do not have to be presaged merely on narrow self interest, but could be linked to behaving altruistically. This leads to an exploration of the role that virtue ethics can play in animal ethics. It is argued that, despite the potential offered by virtue ethics, it is doubtful if a credible indirect duty approach to animals can be developed,

This chapter can be considered as an additional argument by elimination in support for the HOT Thesis. It would be impossible to attempt to refute all, or most, philosophical theories of consciousness existing at the present time, but this chapter presents a criticism of three related theories that share the common goal of offering a reductive theory of consciousness in mentalistic terms. It begins by offering a criticism of first-order representationalism (FOR), specifically Tye’s PANIC theory and Dretske’s own version of FOR, which refers to theories that attempt to explain conscious experience primarily in terms of first-order intentional states. A rejection of Carruthers’s dual-content or dispositional HOT theory as well as a criticism of Lycan’s higher-order perception (HOP) theory follow suit in an effort to make the case for the HOT Thesis.

This chapter discusses the consciousness of most animals as posited by the Animals Thesis. The reconciliation of this thesis with the HOT and Conceptualism Theses is the main focus, especially considering that the Animals Thesis, like the Infants Thesis, is a widely held view. Some argue, however, that animals do not possess the faculties that allow them to have concepts—or, in the case of the HOT theory, sophisticated concepts which are required by the HOT theory. An exchange with Peter Carruthers, who accepts the conclusion that HOT theory entails that most animals are not conscious, is also illustrated and criticized. Many animals, in fact, have the capacity to possess mental concepts and self-concepts as demonstrated by “Lloyd Morgan’s Canon,” which posits that attributing conscious mental states to animals is ultimately the more prudent hypothesis.

Inferentialism about self-knowledge faces the challenge of explaining self-knowledge of states of mind that aren’t standing attitudes. Inferences from evidence require knowledge of one’s evidence, and the evidence from which one’s standing attitudes are inferred includes various types of ‘occurrent’ psychological states, including inner speech, emotions, and feelings. It is argued that knowledge of such ‘internal promptings’ is itself inferential, and that this does not generate a problematic regress. Access to internal promptings is, as Carruthers argues, interpretive, and interpretive access to one’s internal promptings is both epistemically and psychologically inferential. On this account, self-knowledge is holistic rather than linear, and no problematic circularity is implied.

This chapter places the Consolation’s system of metric repetition, outlined in the previous chapter, within the context of repetition and memory more generally, and especially as these were entwined with moral, aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and literary practices in antiquity.