O'Shaughnessy, Brian 1925-

PERSONAL: Born September 10, 1925, in Australia; son of William Thomas Bernard (a medical practitioner) and Nora Clare (an orchestra violinist; maiden name, Lynch) O'Shaughnessy; married Edna Rutovitz (a psychoanalyst), September 29, 1954; children: Benjamin, Katherine, Rosalind. Education: University of Melbourne, B.A. (with honors), 1952; Oxford University, M.A., 1954. Hobbies and other interests: Travel (Europe, the United States, India), music.

ADDRESSES: Home—22 Heath Hurst Rd., London NW3 2RX, England. Office—King's College, University of London, Strand, London WCE2, England. E-mail—b.oshaughnessy@talk21.com.

CAREER: Philosopher, educator, and writer. Sulgrave Manor Board, Northamptonshire, England, secretary, 1956–60; City University, London, England, lecturer in philosophy, 1960–67; University of London, London, reader in philosophy at Bedford College, 1967–84, reader in philosophy at King's College, 1984–.

MEMBER: Mind Association, Aristotelian Society.

WRITINGS:

The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory, two volumes, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1980, revised edition, 1981.

Consciousness and the World, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor to philosophy journals.

SIDELIGHTS: In his book Consciousness and the World, philosopher Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates what constitutes human consciousness and writes about his theory of consciousness in terms of various psychological constituents with an emphasis on perception. He discusses such issues as the relationship between perception and attention and also delves into the various modes of sensory perception that work with raw data to provide a representation of how humans perceive reality. "He presents a theory that is rather old-fashioned and these days rarely defended: the theory that all our perception of the outer world depends on awareness of psychological items in our own minds called sense-data," explained Thomas Nagel in the New York Review of Books. A contributor to the Thymos Web site described the book as "an inquiry on an impressive scale."

O'Shaughnessy once told CA: "University teaching is a great stimulus to personal research and writing. My philosophical interests cover contemporary analytical philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and twentieth-century existentialist and phenomenological philosophy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002, Thomas Nagel, review of Consciousness and the World.

ONLINE

Thymos, http://www.thymos.com/ (February 17, 2006), review of Consciousness and the World.