Shadworth Hodgson
Consciousness accompanies brain processes without causing them: one of the first to defend this idea.
Life
Shadworth Hodgson (1832-1912) was an English philosopher who worked outside the university, on private means. He was the first president of the Aristotelian Society (1880-1894). His main work, The Metaphysic of Experience (1898), starts from experience as it is given, before the split between subject and object. He is one of the first to hold that consciousness accompanies brain processes without causing them, and William James acknowledged him as a forerunner of pragmatism.
Main works
A metaphysical analysis of time and space as aspects of experience.
An ethical enquiry in two books, which also treats the relation between consciousness and nerve movements.
Sets out his method: start from what reflection finds in experience.
His system, in four volumes.
In his own words
« Do I then deny the existence of a Soul? By no means; the soul is not indeed the cause of the phenomena of states of consciousness; it is those phenomena themselves. »
« When therefore language is used which speaks of a state of consciousness as a cause, it must be understood to include the nerve state or nerve movement of which it is the evidence. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceConsciousness accompanies brain processes without acting on them (epiphenomenalism): it is real but has no causal power.
Hodgson, The Theory of Practice (1870)