This book addresses one of the central problems in the philosophy of mind, namely, the relation between the conscious mind and the body. It argues for a radically new way to understand the relation in terms of a heretofore unthematized concept of being, dubbed subjective being; a concept employed by us when we judge that there is something it is like to be a bat, or that there is nothing it feels like to be a rock. Specifically, in the case of human consciousness, it argues for the view that being a brain is undergoing conscious states. The resulting position makes it possible to chart a middle course between physicalism and dualism, avoiding the excesses of both, while providing novel answers to some of the most persistent questions in the philosophy of mind, such as the place of the conscious mind in nature, the nature of mind-body interaction, the metaphysical nature of action, and the metaphysical possibility of philosophical “zombies”. This monograph appeals to students and researchers working in the philosophy of mind.

Guy Elgat is a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Being Guilty: Freedom, Responsibility, and Conscience in German Philosophy from Kant to Heidegger (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Nietzsche’s Psychology of Ressentiment: Revenge and Justice in On the Genealogy of Morals (Routledge, 2017).