"Jonardon Ganeri presents an account of mind in which attention, not self, explains the experiential and normative situatedness of human beings in the world. Attention consists in an organisation of awareness and action at the centre of which there is neither a practical will nor a phenomenological witness. Attention performs two roles in experience, a selective role of placing and a focal role of access. Attention improves our epistemic standing, because it is in the nature of attention to settle on what is real and to shun what is not real. When attention is informed by expertise, it is sufficient for knowledge. That gives attention a reach beyond the perceptual: for attention is a determinable whose determinates include the episodic memory from which our narrative identities are made, the empathy for others that situates us in a social world, and the introspection that makes us self-aware. Empathy is other-directed attention, placed on you and focused on your states of mind; it is akin to listening. Empathetic attention is central to a range of experiences that constitutively require a contrast between oneself and others, all of which involve an awareness of oneself as the object of another's attention. An analysis of attention as mental action gainsays authorial conceptions of self, because it is the nature of intending itself, effortful attention in action, to settle on what to do and to shun what not to do. In ethics, a conception of persons as beings with a characteristic capacity for attention offers hope for resolution in the conflict between individualism and impersonalism"-- Provided by publisher.

pt. IPriority of Attention -- 1. Attention and Action -- Attention, Not Self -- Agent-Causal Self Denied -- Attention as Mental Action -- Buddhaghosa's Attentionalism -- 2. Consciousness -- Concomitants and Causes -- Finding Consciousness -- Four Defining Features -- 3. Thought and World -- Intentionality is Irreducible -- Aspects of Attention -- Feeling for Reality -- Functional Definitions -- World Normatively Alive -- pt. II Attention and Knowledge -- 4. Content of Perceptual Experience -- Mindedness and the Epistemic Role of Experience -- Does Linguistic Capability Pervade Experience? -- Felt Evaluation and Action Solicitation -- Labelling and Cognitive Access -- Phenomenal Quality Overflows Cognitive Access -- Intentionalism Revisited -- 5. Perceptual Attention -- Two Roles of Attention -- Thinking-Of and Thinking-Through -- Attention and Perceiving-As -- Perspective and Object Files -- 6. Attention and Knowledge -- Attentional Justification -- Cognitive Penetration -- Attention and Imagination -- Attention, Knowledge, and Expertise -- pt. III Calling of Attention -- 7. Orienting Attention -- Puzzle about Attention -- Can the Puzzle be Dissolved? -- Does the Puzzle Trade on an Ambiguity? -- Subliminal Attention -- Crossmodality and Subliminal Orienting -- 8. Theory of Vision -- Vision's Three Stages -- Primary Visual Acknowledgement -- Subliminal Seeing and Phenomenal Quality -- 9. Disunity of Mind -- Why Mind is not an Internal Sense -- Low-Level Mind: Forerunning -- High-Level Mind: Inter-Cognizing -- Top-Down Effects on the Modules of Mind -- 10. Working Memory and Attention -- Late Gate-Keeping -- Mind in Running Mode -- Internal Monitoring Denied -- Theatre Simile Reworked -- Attention: Window not Spotlight -- pt. IV Attention Expanded -- 11. Varieties of Attention -- Attention is not a Natural Psychological Kind -- Intending as Attention -- Introspection as Attention -- Mindful Attention -- Divided Attention -- Attention and Selection -- 12. Narrative Attention -- Time and the Self -- Episodic Memory as Attention -- Autonoetic Consciousness and Ownership -- Episodic Memory and Reflexive Mental Files -- 13. Empathetic Attention -- Empathy: The Awareness of Others as Others -- Empathy as Attention -- Empathy as Experiential Access -- Testimony and Imagination -- Empiricism in the Philosophy of Mind -- pt. V Attention and Identity -- 14. Identifying Persons -- Freedom from Alienation -- Concept of a Living Being -- Persons as Loci of Value and Significance -- Disgust: An Immune System for Cognition -- On the Ecotonality of Mind and Life -- Craving as Autonoetic Longing -- 15. Self and Other -- Oneself as Object of Another's Attention -- Phenomenology and the Normative -- Individualism and Impersonalism Rejected -- 16. Finitude and Flow -- Attention and Centring -- Self-Narratives and Survival -- Attending to What Matters at the End of Life.