Illusionism and its place in contemporary philosophy of mind

Keith Frankish is a British-Greek philosopher mainly specializing in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. He is an Honorary Reader in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, UK, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. Alongside many published papers, Frankish is the author of several books, including Mind and Supermind (2007), co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science (2012) and The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (2014), and editor of Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017). In the philosophy of mind, Frankish is best known for his “illusionist” theory of consciousness, according to which phenomenal consciousness in an introspective illusion – that it is an artefact of the limitations of introspection (Frankish 2017, 22). This view is not a new one and it has many powerful defenders, pre-eminently the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. In the following interview, we are discussing illusionism as one of the theoretical approaches to the problem of consciousness. Specifically, we are focusing on the main hypotheses of illusionism, its response to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, as well as its answer to other problems related to philosophical and scientific research on consciousness.