ABSTRACT
Let me begin this chapter with a bold but, I believe, justified claim: the problem of consciousness begins in the seventeenth century. To be sure, ancient philosophers (above all, Aristotle) addressed various topics in the philosophy of mind, including perceptual awareness. And medieval thinkers, in their investigations of the nature of cognition, sensation, and volition, had much to say about intentionality and other features of conscious states. 1 But what we now regard as the “hard problem of consciousness,” to use a well-known phrase, 2 is something that did not occupy philosophers in a serious way until the early modern period. 3
