A quale (plural, 'qualia') is supposed to be the 'feel' of some experience, such as seeing red, hearing middle C, or tasting chocolate. I think that the idea is supposed to capture the common--although not universally accepted--intuition that there is something that 'it is like' to have a certain kind of experience, that marks it out as that kind of experience. (For an excellent, intuitive, presentation of this idea, see Thomas Nagel, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?".) There is, I should say, considerable disagreement among philosophers about whether there even are qualia.

You raise--in Sartrean terms--the excellent question of whether Sartre engages what contemporary philosophers call 'the problem of free will', the problem, that is, of how, if determinism, according to which every event is caused by some preceding event, is true, agents can be said to make free choices or determine themselves. Recent philosophical answers to this problem fall broadly into three classes: compatibilists believe that even if every event, including human choices, are determined by some preceding event, human beings are nevertheless free; incompatibilists believe that if every event is determined by some preceding event, then only if human choices are not determined by some preceding event can they be free: libertarian incompatibilists believe that human choices are not determined by preceding events, and therefore agents are free, while other incompatibilists believe that because human choices, like all other events, are caused by preceding events, human beings are not free. In light of...

The question of whether there are unconscious perceptions, and if so, their nature, has received considerable attention from philosophers and psychologists from the seventeenth century onwards. One's answer to this question will reveal a lot about one's conception of perception in particular and of the nature of the mind in general. Some care is needed in approaching the question. 'Perceive' is sometimes taken to mean 'be aware of', and if it is so taken, of course one cannot perceive anything unconciously, by definition. Such a definition doesn't, however, dispose of the question, for one can either stipulate that by 'perceive', one means to 'have a mental representation' (for now, let me just stipulate that a mental representation is an internal representation that enables one to have a sense-based perception: the nature and status of mental representations is a topic that deserves considerable attention in its own right): if one takes 'perceive' in this sense, then one can have both conscious...