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This course is taught en bloc. For dates and times, please see the entry on eCampus. Illusionism holds that phenomenal consciousness (i.e. the felt redness of red, the ache of a headache) doesn't exist, and that our overwhelming conviction that it does is itself an introspective illusion generated by the brain. On this view, the task for a science of the mind isn't to explain phenomenality but to explain why we so stubbornly misrepresent ourselves as having it. This course will examine the case for illusionism and the objections it invites. We'll ask what it would take for such an illusion to be possible, why illusionism strikes nearly everyone as absurd, whether its defenders can explain that very resistance, and what follows if they're right.
Core Readings: Keith Frankish "Illusism as a Theory of Consciousness" (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2016) François Kammerer, House of Mirrors: The Illusion of Phenomenal Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2026) open access, free to read and download as a PDF