Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments against (...) Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists. (shrink)

When we begin to investigate the persistence of objects through time, we find immediately that the sort of concerns embodied in Leibniz's Law cause philosophers to divide themselves into the two major camps of Purdurantists and Endurantists. What is required according to each for a given object at a given time to be identified with a given object at another time is held to be dramatically different, even while both often look to the same general sort of indicators for their (...) answers to identity questions: identity or similarity of physical properties, including relational properties like spatial location. I believe, however, that logically prior to the problem of the persistence of objects through time will be questions regarding the composition of objects--we must have coherent notions of what an object is, what it means for parts to compose an object, and what is required for an object to be considered to exist at a single time before we can discuss the continued existence of objects at other times. I believe that posing the problem of temporal gaps for both the Perdurantist and Endurantist to solve can help us uncover reasonable answers to these more basic questions, and thereby help us judge the comparative coherence of the parent theories. Towards this goal, we investigate here some of the assumptions of persistence theories--that Perdurantists are four-dimensionalists and Endurantists are Presentists, for example--before moving on to find reasonable explanations of the composition of objects from within each theory. Important at this stage is clarifying such concepts as parthood and the present. When we at length turn our attention to the problem of gaps, it becomes useful to distinguish two sorts of gaps, each with their own difficulties: a 'gap' as a length of time during which the proper parts of an object are scattered through space, and a 'gap' as a length of time during which the proper parts of an object do not exist in space at all. My contention here is that Perdurantism, paired with four-dimensional spacetime, provides the most coherent answers to the challenges presented throughout. (shrink)

Keskityn siihen miten Leibnizilla yksittäiset mielihyvän tai mielipahan tiedostamattomat havainnot voivat kasautua tai tiivistyä ja muodostaa vähitellen tunteita, joista tulemme tietoisiksi.

The ordinary conception of pain has two major threads that are in tension with each other. It is this tension that generates various puzzles in our philosophical understanding of pain. This is a short encyclopedia entry surveying some of the major philosophical puzzles about pain.

There are two main camps in 20th-century philosophy of time: A-theorists who believe in the dynamic model of reality, and B-theorists who maintain a static model of reality. After the publication of Putnam’s influential article, “time and physical geometry”, the implications of the Special Theory of Relativity became serious in metaphysical discussions about temporal reality. Some philosophers argued that this theory contradicts the dynamic model and implies the ontology of the static model, namely, the objective reality of the present, past (...) and future events. In response, some advocates of the dynamic model argued that there can be dynamic models in relativistic setting, though they are different, radically, from old theories of dynamic reality. In this paper, first, I shall discuss how special relativity contradicts the traditional dynamic model and, then, how new dynamic models imply a relative concept of reality, in contrast to its old absolute concept and, so, why these strategies are very unintuitive. Finally, I shall argue that this radical conceptual shift about reality is, not only unintuitive, but unwarranted and, in some sense, inconsistent as well. (shrink)

What are the relations between preattentive feature-placing and states of perceptual awareness? For the purposes of this paper, states of "perceptual awareness" are confined to the simplest possible exemplars: states in which one is aware of some aspect of the appearance of something one perceives. Subjective contours are used as an example. Early visual processing seems to employ independent, high-bandwidth, preattentive feature "channels", followed by a selective process that directs selective attention. The mechanisms that yield subjective contours are found very (...) early in this processing. An experiment by Greg Davis and Jon Driver is described; it seems to show that multiple subjective figures can be coded in these preattentive, parallel stages of visual processing. I propose that some of these preattentive states might register the very same differences that, were one aware of them, would be phenomenal differences. Some arguments pro and con on this possibility are assessed. (shrink)

In preparation for examining the place of introspective evidence in scientific psychology, the chapter begins by clarifying what introspection has been supposed to show, and why some concluded that it couldn't deliver. This requires a brief excursus into the various uses to which introspection was supposed to have been put by philosophers and psychologists in the modern period, together with a summary of objections. It then reconstructs some actual uses of introspection (or related techniques, differently monikered) in the early days (...) of experimental psychology. It distinguishes broader and narrower conceptions of introspection and argues that recent critics have tended to misdescribe how introspection was supposed to work. Drawing upon the broader conception of introspection, it argues that introspective reports are ineliminable in perceptual psychology. It concludes with some examples of such ineliminable uses of introspective reports in both earlier and recent perceptual psychology. (shrink)