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Tom McClelland, The Varieties of Consciousness, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 265, October 2016, Pages 871–874, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqv111
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Uriah Kriegel's third book confirms his reputation as a leading figure in the philosophy of consciousness. His ambitious project is to answer the question ‘…how many types of sui generis, irreducible, basic, primitive phenomenology do we need to posit to just be able to describe the stream of consciousness?’ (p. 1). Kriegel's timely book offers a systematic overview of the issue's logical geography and makes a number of important new contributions to the debate. In particular, he adds weight to the growing literature challenging the orthodox view that our phenomenal life is exhausted by perceptual and algedonic (pain/pleasure) experiences—a view Kriegel labels ‘mainstream stingy-ism’ (p. 6).
Kriegel's extensive introduction clarifies the book's target question and lays out his strategy. He explains that the question does not concern specific phenomenal properties, but rather the broad phenomenal determinables of which all specific phenomenal properties are determinates (p. 9). He introduces a clear and practicable strategy for identifying what these phenomenal types are, explaining that for any putative phenomenal type we must decide between: (a) the eliminativist view that this type of experience does not exist; (b) the reductionist view that experiences of this type do exist but are reducible to experiences of some other type; and (c) the primitivist view that this type is a sui generis irreducible phenomenal type. This procedure will ultimately provide us with a set of primitive types that constitute all experience.
