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From our contemporary perspective, it is a curiosity of Ancient Greek that it lacks a word for consciousness. Not only is there no exact match of our word ‘consciousness’, but also every Greek word that might be taken to be getting at some aspect of what we capture with our ‘consciousness’ has a distinct meaning other than consciousness. Contemporary scholars sometimes find nevertheless a “theory of consciousness” in Aristotle, built from the resources available from his philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. But it is unclear to what extent this is fostered upon him by our own interests, rather than actually illuminating the structure of Aristotle’s thought. ‘Consciousness’ may be one of those cases in which the language was lacking because there was no conceptual work for it to do within the framework available.

There is no single term in Aristotle’s works or other classical philosophical texts that could be translated as ‘consciousness’ on all occasions. No wonder that there have been some modern philosophers who have denied that Aristotle even had a notion of consciousness.1 However, the notion of consciousness is far from unambiguously understood and defined in today’s philosophy. There is a wide variety of uses for the term reaching from knowledge in general to intentionality, introspection, and phenomenal experience. The question whether Aristotle had a notion or a theory of consciousness cannot be informatively answered before explicating the kind of consciousness we are looking for.

Pedigrees with familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD), caused by mutations in either the amyloid precursor protein (APP) or the presenilin 1 (PS1) or presenilin 2 (PS2) genes, show considerable phenotypic variability. Monogenic diseases typically exhibit variations in biological features, such as age of onset, severity, and multiple clinical and cellular phenotypes. This variation can be due to specific alleles of the disease gene, environmental effects, or modifier genes.

Spastic paraparesis (SP), or progressive spasticity of the lower limbs, is frequently hereditary, with over 20 loci being identified for uncomplicated (paraparesis alone) and complicated (paraparesis and other neurological features) disease subtypes. Moreover, over 10 different genes have been identified with mutations that lead to SP. While dementia is a common feature of complicated SP, a reciprocal observation has also been made since the earliest clinical reports of FAD: namely, that a number of AD families have been reported in which some individuals have SP. In 1997, the key observation was made that PS1 mutations were associated with the presence of SP, suggesting that there was a complex relationship between SP and AD. In addition, in 1998, it was also shown that PS1 AD/SP pedigrees frequently have variant, large, non-cored plaques without neuritic dystrophy, named cotton wool plaques (CWP). The PS1 mutations associated with CWP secrete unusually high levels of the amyloid β 42 peptide, suggesting a molecular basis for the formation of this distinctive plaque type.

The SP phenotype in PS1 pedigrees appears to be associated in some cases with a delayed onset of dementia, compared with affected individuals who present with dementia only. Some individuals who present with SP have remained dementia-free for up to 10 years. Variations seen in neuropathology and neurological symptoms in PS1 FAD suggest that modifier genes may underlie this phenotypic heterogeneity. As PS1 mutations are almost always associated with a particularly aggressive form of presenile dementia, these findings suggest the existence of a protective factor in some individuals with SP.

It is sometimes regarded as distinctive of the premodern philosophical tradition that it tends to treat the various psychological phenomena according to the capacities or faculties (Gr. ) a living being has for apprehending the world and for coming to terms with it. In short, the faculty psychology approach has it that reality comes laid out in layers of varying complexity and abstraction – it has sensible as well as intelligible properties, etc., and for each aspect of reality with which a living being has to contend, a corresponding psychological capacity is posited that is responsible for the reception and processing of that specific type of information. A seminal argument in this vein can be found in Aristotle’s , the second book (II 5–12), where five proper sensibles and five sensory organs are distinguished in correspondence with the five types of sense-impressions we routinely receive, and in the third book (III 1), where this list is put forward as being exhaustive.

This chapter discusses intention and presence in medieval philosophy. It introduces and analyses a high-level debate on intentionality and the mode of presence of the object in the fourteenth century. The medieval philosophers discuss, among other things, the notion of as tending towards, as well as the difference between presence in the strict sense (the object being really present) and presentiality, namely the mode in which an object (both present and absent) can be present to a thinker or a mind. In addition to introducing dilemmas which, later, triggered the modern scholarship on intentionality through Franz Brentano, the medieval particularities become apparent in the article. For instance, before William of Ockham the philosophers insist on a symmetry or reversibility of the intentional relation: the subject’s tending towards the object is matched by the object’s presence to the subject, and the conscious subject is thus not given any focal significance in the inquiry

Augustine tells, in the eighth chapter of his XI (, c. 996), that he often notices after reading a page or a chapter that he does not remember at all what he has read. He has to read the text again. According to Augustine’s explanation of the phenomenon, if one is not interested, the text does not reach one’s memory. The eyes are reading, but the mind does not follow the thoughts read.

To the extent that ancient and medieval thinkers were even concerned with what we nowadays call perceptual consciousness or awareness, it was in relation to specifying the functions of sensation and its relationship to thought that the matter arose. Sensory awareness was generally thought to be a transitive relationship, awareness of particular things, shared by humans and animals, and, for many, the model for thought in general. Within the Aristotelian tradition, even self-awareness was thought to depend ultimately on the awareness we have of particular objects that impinge upon our senses and provide us, thereby, with the occasion for reflecting on our thoughts, our own particular souls and the nature of the soul in general.1 The idea that cognition might be at base a passive process was, however, tempered by the desire to acknowledge the active functions of the intellect and, in the animal soul, the activity of the so-called “internal” senses.

Descartes affords several notions of consciousness as he explains the characteristics of the diverse features of human thought from infancy to adulthood and from dreaming to attentive wakefulness. I will argue that Descartes provides the resources for a rich and coherent view of conscious mentality from rudimentary consciousness through reflexive consciousness to consciousness achieved by deliberate, attentive reflection. I shall begin by making two general yet important remarks concerning the conceptual starting points of my investigation.

Let me start with my conclusions: like most other philosophers of his era, Spinoza did not have well-developed views on consciousness and its place in the mind. Somewhat paradoxically, however, a basic tenet of his metaphysics generated a problem which might have been solved if he had thought more about those issues. So in the end, then, Spinoza did not have much to say about consciousness even though the coherency or at least the plausibility of his system demanded it.

Kant’s philosophy is deeply systematic. Understanding his account of human consciousness requires considering some of his broader systematic analyses, to the extent required here to understand his account of consciousness, which is of great philosophical and historical interest. “Anti-Cartesianism” and “externalism” are key issues in recent philosophy of mind.