engleski

Gestalt Relations and Varieties of Mental Content

Since they were introduced, there have been tendencies to extend Gestalt relations and principles beyond their "natural" theoretical limits, i.e., to apply them throughout the realm of mental life, irrespective of the type of mental content/activity in question. An apt example of such tendency is the "field theory of consciousness" proposed by Aron Gurwitsch, an early proponent of Husserlian phenomenology, who was strongly influenced by Leibniz and the Gestalt tradition, particularly by the Berlin school. Despite his explicit recognition of the "limits of the concept of Gestalt", Gurwitch undertook an interesting revision/extension of the received construal of the notion. His ambition was to offer an all-inclusive structural (descriptive) model of the conscious mind, covering radically different types of intentional unities ("syntheses") – both perceptual ("passive", "pre-predicative") and conceptual ("predicative", propositionally expressible), including the ambiguous intermediary cases. In the first part of the paper, I will briefly outline and critically assess Gurwitsch's Gestalt model of conscious experience with special regard to the notions of saliency, intensity and relevancy, as well as to the role of implicit (sub- or preconscious) mental acts/contents. In the second part, I will probe Gurwitsch's model against the background of some more recent conceptions of mind (e.g., Searle's, Dennett's, Baars') in order to draw some conclusions concerning the varieties of mental contents and the nature of their relationships and transformations.

svijest ; mentalni sadržaji ; geštalt-odnosi ; Aron Gurwitsch ; zamjedba ; intencionalnost ; Dennett

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