On Consciousness And Meaning

The correlation of consciousness and meaning is discussed in this paper to focus on the scientific findings and the clear proof of knowledge, which includes the following parts: (1) The modern scientific revolution in the early 1900s is the resource of later scientific thought and all the scientific thoughts are the results of the reflection of it. Therefore, after a brief introduction to the consciousness and meaning, the results of scientific revolution in the early 1900s and their influence to the philosophical reflection are discussed. (2) The academic purpose of Husserl is to establish a strictly determining and self-evident foundation for knowledge so as to have philosophy become a strict science. The pursuit of knowledge foundation has his thought from the exploration of meaning to that of meaning foundation, which, for Husserl, is human's consciousness. (3) The further development of pursuing the clear proof of knowledge is Heidegger's pursuit of the natural clarification, after that, Gadamer proposed the new theories: "the fusion of horizon", "the history of effect", which provide human science with the explanation of ontology. Above all, Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer all address in the internal perspective of the confirmable knowledge, while philosophy of logic empiricism and holistic analysis do it in the external perspective (No. 4). (5) 1970s saw the amalgamation of the above two perspectives, of which one of the exponents is J. R. Searle, American philosopher. (6) Brian, in which consciousness and meaning take place, is no longer a black box which people know nothing about it, although only part of it is discovered, the new foundation of philosophy thought has been formed.After Descartes, Husserl is the last one of the very important philosophers who turn from epistemology to ontology. Then, many philosophers, headed by Heidegger, turned to ontology, which led to the emergence of two philosophical systems, one is philosophical hermeneutics, the other is analytic philosophy, they all focus on the exploration of meaning and understanding rather than the consideration of consciousness, in other words, the exploration of meaning is more important than the consideration of consciousness. This lasted to the late 1960s, when philosophers were aware of the important basic position of "mind" in philosophy, which led to anothernew change, i.e. mental philosophy was paid much attention to. This lasts to today, one of the exponents is John R. Searle, a famous philosopher, who reemphasizes the important position of intentionality in philosophy, which makes a formal circle with Husserl's theories of intentionality. The formal circle here refers to modern science has helped people to develop the study of meaning, so that the people's thinking consciousness has changed essentially.All the study shows that the correlation of consciousness and meaning has already changed from the thought of a pure philosophy to the goals of many disciplines, and become a study core of modern scientific technology and humanistic understanding, etc.