What is given to us in conscious experience? Michelle Montague offers a new answer, and thus contributes to a general theory of mental content. She analyses conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and argues that all experience essentially involves four things: content, intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness.

"Gut-wrenching force...A majestic, fiery epic. The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive." - The New York Times Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of Live by Night—now a Warner Bros. movie starring Ben Affleck—offers an unflinching family epic that captures the political unrest of a nation caught between a well-patterned past and an unpredictable future. This beautifully written novel of American history tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power at the end of World War I.

"... Leaving far behind all that I know, floating, drifting we go with the flow.Together we explore every beach, the big fish always just out of reach ..."Given GoodwinThis is a story of a unique family legacy come full circle. A story of finding home wherever you may be. Inspired by the feature film documentary called Given, this is based on the true and wild journey of surfers Aamion and Daize Goodwin as they take their family to fulfill a calling handed down through generations to find freedom in surrender.

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience—of 'the given'—lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. Montague argues that conscious perception, conscious thought, and conscious emotion each have a distinctive, irreducible kind of phenomenology—what she calls 'sensory phenomenology', 'cognitive phenomenology', and 'evaluative phenomenology' respectively—and that these kinds of phenomenology are essential in accounting for the intentionality of these mental phenomena.

In 1968, when Riley is thirteen, her brother Mick goes missing in Vietnam. Her family shattered, Riley finds refuge in isolation and drugs until she falls in love with a boy from the reservation, but he, too, is on his way to the war. Riley takes off as well, in search of Mick, or of a way to be in the world without him. She travels from Montana to San Francisco and from there to Vietnam. Among the scarred angels she meets along the way are Primo, a half-blind vet with a secret he cant keep; Lu, a cab-driving addict with an artists eye; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid, Rileys conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her grandmothers ashes in a tin box. All are part of a lost generation, coming of age too quickly as they struggle to reassemble lives disordered by pain and loss. At center stage is Riley, a masterpiece of vulnerability and tenacity, wondering if shell ever have the courage to return to her parents farm, to its ghosts and memoriesresident in a place she has surrendered, surely, the right to call home.

"Jay must hide her true abilities if she is to stay safe. But as her powers grow stronger and the authorities more intolerant, she knows that time is running out. When her energy is detected by a powerful Reader, she has little choice but to take action. On the run with her friends, and just one step ahead of her pursuers, she must decipher the words of the Legend and reveal the secrets of her childhood stories if she is to find safety."--Back cover

Originally published in 1970. This work evaluates the appeal to the sensually given which played an important role in epistemological discussions during the early 20th Century. While many contemporary philosophers regarded this appeal as a mistake, there were still some who defended the notion of the given and even made it the foundation of their views regarding perception. The author here points to several different views concerning the nature of the sensually given and argues that the issue between them is not empirical, as is naturally suggested by what he calls ‘the Naïve View’ of the dispute, but rather metaphysical, involving different theories regarding the relationship between Thought and Reality. This leads on to a discussion of the different views presently held regarding the task of the epistemologist, and to a new suggestion with regard to the relationship between common sense and the rival ontologies suggested by scientists and philosophers. In the course of the argument a variety of different topics are discussed such as the correspondence and coherence theories of truth, the differences between scientific and philosophical theories, and the relevance of scientific treatments of the subject of perception to the treatment of this topic by philosophers.