Consciousness

Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. Philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness which is experience itself and access consciousness which is the processing of the things in experience (Block 2004).

Etymology

"Consciousness" derives from Latin "conscientia", which primarily means moral conscience. Literallly, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridic texts by writers such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. In christian theology, conscience stands for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered and which is only fully known to god. Medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas describe the conscientia as the act by which we apply practical and moral knowledge to our own actions (Aquinas, De Veritate 17,1 c.a.).

Related Topics:
Cicero - Thomas Aquinas

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René Descartes was the first to use "conscientia" in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, and consequently, the translators of his writings in other languages like french and english coined new words in order to denote merely psychological consciousness. These are, for instance, "conscience psychologique", "consciousness", and "Bewusstsein". See Catherine G. Davies, Conscience as Consciousness, Oxford 1990, and Hennig, Cartesian Conscientia.

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