Külpe on Cognitive Attitudes

This paper offers a reconstruction of Külpe’s theory of cognitive attitudes from the perspective of contemporary debates about cognitive phenomenology. I argue that Külpe’s view constrasts with analytic mainstream approaches to the same phenomena in at least two respects. First, Külpe claims, cognitive experiences are best described in terms of occurrent cognitive acts or attitudes toward sensory, imagistic or intellectual contents. Second, occurrent cognitive attitudes are intransitively conscious in the sense that they are experienced by, or phenomenally manifest to, the subject. I call the combination of those two claims the conscious cognitive attitudes theory. I suggest that, despite some difficulties, this theory offers a worth-considering alternative to contentual and/or nonphenomenological theories of cognitive phenomena.