Are the following propositions true of the colors: No object can be more than one determinable or determinate color all over at the same time (Incompatibility); the colors of objects are mind-independent (Objectivism); and most human observers usually perceive the colors of objects veridically in typical conditions (Veridicality)? One reason to think not is that the empirical literature appears to support the proposition that there is mass perceptual disagreement about the colors of objects amongst human observers in typical conditions (P-Disagreement). (...) In this article, we defend Incompatibility, Objectivism, and Veridicality by calling into question whether the empirical literature really supports P-Disagreement. (shrink)

Learning the psychological origins of our moral judgments can lead us to lose confidence in them. In this paper I explain why. I consider two explanations drawn from existing literature—regarding epistemic unreliability and automaticity—and argue that neither is fully adequate. I then propose a new explanation, according to which psychological research reveals the extent to which we are disturbingly disunified as moral agents.

Adequate epistemic justification is best conceived as the appearance, over time, of knowledge to the subject. ‘Appearance’ is intended literally, not as a synonym for belief. It is argued through consideration of examples that this account gets the extension of ‘adequately justified belief’ at least roughly correct. A more theoretical reason is then offered to regard justification as the appearance of knowledge: If we have a knowledge norm for assertion, we do our best to comply with this norm when we (...) express as assertions only beliefs that appear to us to be knowledge. If we are doing our best, there is little point in further sanctions. So a norm of knowledge for assertion would lead to a secondary norm of justified belief as the appearance of knowledge, marking a point at which our assertions may be corrected but should not be blamed. (shrink)

Fodor advocates a view of cognitive processes as computations defined over the language of thought (or Mentalese). Even among those who endorse Mentalese, considerable controversy surrounds its representational format. What semantically relevant structure should scientific psychology attribute to Mentalese symbols? Researchers commonly emphasize logical structure, akin to that displayed by predicate calculus sentences. To counteract this tendency, I discuss computational models of navigation drawn from probabilistic robotics. These models involve computations defined over cognitive maps, which have geometric rather than logical (...) structure. They thereby demonstrate the possibility of rational cognitive processes in an exclusively non-logical representational medium. Furthermore, they offer much promise for the empirical study of animal navigation. (shrink)

How is it possible for a picture to depict a picture? Proponents of perceptual theories of depiction, who argue that the content of a picture is determined, in part, by the visual state it elicits in suitable viewers, that is, by a state of seeing-in, have given a plausible answer to this question. They say that a picture depicts a picture, in part, because, under appropriate conditions of observation, a suitable viewer will be able to see a picture in the (...) picture. In this article, I first argue that this answer is in conflict with the way in which some of the most influential perceptual theories of depiction – Robert Hopkins's version of the experienced resemblance theory and Dominic Lopes's version of the recognition theory – construe seeing-in. I then formulate a version of the recognition theory that avoids this conflict and show how it can explain the depiction of pictures. (shrink)

Many people have recently argued that we need to distinguish between experiences and seemings and that this has consequences for views about how perception provides evidence. In this article I spell out my take on these issues by doing three things. First, I distinguish between mere sensations like seeing pitch black all around you and perceptual experiences like seeing a red apple. Both have sensory phenomenology in presenting us with sensory qualities like colors, being analog in Dretske's sense, and being (...) fine-grained. However, only the latter have furthermore a perceptual phenomenology characterized by objectification and related dualities of perspectivality/completion and variation/constancy. Second, I elaborate on the reasons for thinking that both mere sensations and perceptual experiences need to be distinguished from accompanying seemings that passively assign things into conceptual categories and thereby tell you something about them. For example, when you look at a red apple and have the relevant recognitional abilities it will also normally seem to you that this is an apple. Finally, I argue that the best version of the popular dogmatist view about evidence is one which claims that it's neither experiences nor seemings by themselves, but rather the right sorts of composites of experiences and seemings that provide evidence. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHere, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from th...

Volume 2, Issue 4, December 2018, Page 355-364.

In his recent book James Kreines argues that for Hegel reason is “in the world”, but how we are to understand the idea of reason's being so located? One answer, suggested by more traditional theocentric readings of Hegel, would be to appeal to the idea of a divine thought, coursing through the world. Another answer, more congenial to modern sensibilities, might locate reason within the rational activities of inter-subjectively connected human beings, as suggested by Terry Pinkard's idea of the “sociality (...) of reason”. Kreines seems to want to avoid suggestions of the former, but in distancing himself from approaches like the latter, he also seems to refuse the more metaphysically modest alternative. In retracing the contours of Kreines's nuanced attempt to reinflate Hegel's metaphysics as a “metaphysics of reason”, I pose the question as to whether he can avoid reintroducing a more extravagantly metaphysical Hegel than he wishes. (shrink)

Looking out the window, I see that it's raining outside. Do I know that it’s raining outside? According to proponents of the Entailment Thesis, I do. If I see that p, I know that p. In general, the Entailment Thesis is the thesis that if S perceives that p, S knows that p. But recently, some philosophers (McDowell 2002, Turri 2010, Pritchard 2011, 2012) have argued that the Entailment Thesis is false. On their view, we can see p and not (...) know that p. In this paper, I argue that their arguments are unsuccessful. (shrink)

Following Quine, Davidson, and Dennett, I take mental states and linguistic meaning to be individuated with reference to interpretation. The regulative principle of ideal interpretation is to maximize rationality, and this accounts for the distinctiveness and autonomy of the vocabulary of agency. This rationality-maxim can accommodate empirical cognitive-psychological investigation into the nature and limitations of human mental processing. Interpretivism is explicitly anti-reductionist, but in the context of Rorty's neo-pragmatism provides a naturalized view of agents. The interpretivist strategy affords a less (...) despondent view of constructive philosophical activity than Rorty's own. (shrink)

Constructivism undermines realism by arguing that experience is mediated by concepts, and that there is no direct way to examine those aspects of objects that belong to them independently of our conceptualizations; perception is theory-laden. To defend realism one has to show first that perception relates us directly with the world without any intermediary conceptual framework. The result of this direct link is the nonconceptual content of experience. Second, one has to show that part of the nonconceptual content extracted from (...) the environment correctly represents features of mind independent objects. With regard to the first condition, I have argued elsewhere that a part of visual processing, which I call “perception,” is theory-neutral and nonconceptual. In this paper, facing the second demand, I argue that a part of the nonconceptual content of perception presents properties that are the properties of mind independent objects. I claim first that nonconceptual content is the appropriate level of analysis of the issue of realism since it avoids the main problems besetting various types of analysis of the issue at the level of beliefs about the world. Then I claim that a subset of the nonconceptual content presents features of objects in the environment as they really are. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 273-292, October 2020.

According to a classic but nowadays discarded philosophical theory, perceptual experience is a complex of nonconceptual sensory states and full-blown propositional beliefs. This classical dual-component theory of experience is often taken to be obsolete. In particular, there seem to be cases in which perceptual experience and belief conflict: cases of known illusions, wherein subjects have beliefs contrary to the contents of their experiences. Modern dual-component theories reject the belief requirement and instead hold that perceptual experience is a complex of nonconceptual (...) sensory states and some other sort of conceptual state. The most popular modern dual-component theory appeals to sui generis propositional attitudes called ‘perceptual seemings’. This article argues that the classical dual-component theory has the resources to explain known illusions without giving up the claim that the conceptual components of experience are beliefs. The classical dual-component view, though often viewed as outdated and implausible, should be regarded as a serious contender in contemporary debates about the nature of perceptual experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As a part of John Broome’s stated aim to establish a clear distinction between rationality and normativity, Broome suggests a novel definition of normativity as a property term that applies to persons. Since this construal of normativity diverges significantly from most prominent renderings of the concept within contemporary philosophical discussions, it merits critical scrutiny. In response to Broome, I thus examine the technical advantage of Broome’s approach, while also indicating some drawbacks of Broome’s novel conceptualization of ‘normative’ and ‘normativity’.

ResumenEn este trabajo presento brevemente algunos de los argumentos que han puesto en duda aquella tesis según la cual el hecho de percibir las cosas como siendo de determinada manera depende del repertorio de conceptos que uno posee. Los autores de esos argumentos consideran que la percepción es más bien un modo no conceptual de representar el mundo. Mi propósito será mostrar que el debate entre ambas posturas ha puesto de manifiesto una serie de dificultades para las cuales no parece (...) que los defensores de la tesis conceptualista sean capaces de ofrecer una solución satisfactoria.Palabras clavePercepción, creencia, contenido no conceptual, justificaciónAbstract In this paper I briefly present some of the arguments which raised doubt about the thesis according to which perceiving things as being in a given way depends on the background concepts one possess. The authors of these arguments consider that perception is a nonconceptual way of representing the world. My purpose will be to show that the discussion between both views has put forward several difficulties for which defenders of the conceptualist thesis seem to be unable to offer a satisfactory solution.KeywordsPerception, belief, nonconceptual content, justification. (shrink)

The 1990’s, we’ve been told, were the decade of the brain. But without anyone announcing or declaring, much less deciding that it should be so, the 90’s were also a breakthrough decade for the study of consciousness. (Of course we think the two are related, but that is another matter altogether.) William G. Lycan leads the charge with his 1987 book Consciousness (MIT Press), and he has weighed-in again with Consciousness and Experience (1996, MIT Press). Together these two books put (...) forth Lycan’s formidable view of consciousness, extending the theory of mind that he calls ‘homuncular functionalism.’ Roughly, Lycan’s view is that conscious beings are hierarchically composed intentional systems, whose representational powers are to be understood in terms of their biological function. In this review we will call the view ‘teleological functionalism’ or ‘teleofunctionalism’ – the homuncular part, for which Lycan and Daniel Dennett argued convincingly, is now so widely accepted that it fails to distinguish Lycan’s view from other versions of functionalism. This, by itself, is a testament to the importance of Lycan’s work. (shrink)

Renewed worries about the unity of the proposition have been taken as a crucial stumbling block for any traditional conception of propositions. These worries are often framed in terms of how entities independent of mind and language can have truth conditions: why is the proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio true if and only if she loves him? I argue that the best understanding of these worries shows that they should be solved by our theory of truth and not our theory (...) of content. Specifically, I propose a version of the redundancy theory according to which ‘it is true that Desdemona loves Cassio’ expresses the same proposition as ‘Desdemona loves Cassio’. Surprisingly, this variant of the redundancy theory treats ‘is true’ as an ordinary predicate of the language, thereby defusing many standard criticisms of the redundancy theory. (shrink)

Although they may differ on the reason why, many philosophers hold that it is a priori that an object is red if and only if it is such as to look red to normal observers in normal conditions.

The main aim of this paper is to identify a type of fact-given warrant for action that is distinct from reason-based justification for action and defend the view that there are two types of practical warrant. The idea that there are two types of warrant is familiar in epistemology, but has not received much attention in debates on practical normativity. On the view that I will defend, normative facts, qua facts, give rise to entitlement warrant for action. But they do (...) not, qua facts, give rise to reason-based warrant. Normative practical reasons, I will argue, are true propositions that represent fact-based favouring and that are made true by normative facts. (shrink)

The main problems faced by a conception of perception as passive will be introduced through a critical examination of John McDowell's account of 'empirical thinking'. Overcoming these difficulties will lead to a conception of perception as involving an active cognitive participation of the perceiver, and an account of how observational judgment is warranted that is focused on the conditions of experience. In both cases, analogies to inquiry in scientific experimental practice will be explored.

In this paper, I propose a new nonconceptual reading of the B-Deduction. As Hanna correctly remarks :399–415, 2011: 405), the word “cognition” has in both editions of the first Critique a wide sense, meaning nonconceptual cognition, and a narrow meaning, in Kant’s own words “an objective perception”. To be sure, Kant assumes the first meaning to account for why the Deduction is unavoidable. And if we take this meaning as a premise of the B-Deduction, then there is a gap in (...) the argument since the categories are certainly not conditions for non-conceptual cognition. Still, I believe it is not this wide meaning but rather the narrow one that figures in any premise of the B-Deduction. Thus, in the reading that I am proposing, categories are not conditions for representing something, or even conditions for representing something objectively. Instead, they are conditions for the recognition that what we represent through the senses exists mind-independently. In the first step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the propositional thinking that the nonconceptually represented object of the sensible intuition exists objectively. In contrast, in the second step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the apprehension of what our human senses represent nonconceptually as existing objectively. (shrink)

According to the conceptualist view in the philosophy of perception, we must possess concepts for all the objects, properties and relations which feature in our perceptual experiences. In this paper, I investigate the possibility of developing an argument against the conceptualist view by appealing to the notion of attention. In Part One, I begin by setting out an apparently promising version of such an argument, a version which appeals to a link between attention and perceptual demonstrative concept possession. In Part (...) Two, however, I show how the conceptualist can challenge what appears to be the key premise of the argument, and I go on to describe, in Part Three, an important further difficulty which we face if we attempt to overcome this challenge in a particular way. My conclusion will be that the conceptualist's challenge to the argument is convincing and hence that the argument remains inconclusive. (shrink)

This paper begins by considering Dummett's justificationist treatment of statements about the past in his book Truth and the Past (2004). Contrary to Dummett's position, there is no way of applying the intuitionistic distinction in the arithmetical case between direct and indirect methods of establishing a content to the case of past-tense statements. Attempts to do so either give the wrong truth conditions, or rely on notions not available to a justificationist position. A better, realistic treatment makes ineliminable use of (...) identity of state in its positive account of understanding of the past tense; this account can also be applied to other subject matters besides the past. A theory is developed of how realists should conceive of the relation between meaning and evidence. Points from this discussion are used in criticism of Wright's minimalist conception of truth. Three grades of possible involvement of truth and reference in a substantive theory of intentional content are distinguished, and reasons are given for thinking that a range of contents involve the highest degree of involvement of reference and truth in their substantive individuation. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Wilfrid Sellars’ famous Myth of Jones. I argue the myth provides an ontologically austere account of thoughts and beliefs that makes sense of the full range of our folk psychological abilities. Sellars’ account draws on both Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ryle provides Sellars with the resources to make thoughts metaphysically respectable and Wittgenstein the resources to make beliefs rationally criticisable. By combining these insights into a single account, Sellars is able to see reasons as (...) causes and, hence, to respect the full range of our folk psychological generalisations. This is achieved by modelling folk psychological practice on theoretical reasoning. But despite frequent misinterpretation, Sellars does not claim that thoughts and beliefs are theoretical concepts. Thus, folk psychological explanation is not theoretical, and hence, it is not replaceable by scientific theory. Hence, scientific concepts will not eliminate folk psychological concepts. Thus, Sellars avoids eliminativism. (shrink)

Many epistemologists accept some version of the following foundationalist epistemic principle: if one has an experience as if p then one has prima facie justification that p. I argue that this principle faces a challenge that it inherits from classical foundationalism: the problem of the speckled hen. The crux of the problem is that some properties are presented in experience at a level of determinacy that outstrips our recognitional capacities. I argue for an amendment to the principle that adds to (...) its antecedent the requirement that the subject have a recognitional capacity with respect to the given property. (shrink)

The externalist examples of Burge, Putnam etc. were offered as examples of how it is physically identical twins can differ in mental states such as belief, and little attention was paid to the interpretations the twins impose on their respective acoustic inputs. The received story today is that this form of interpretation—the semantic reading one assigns the sounds one hears—is the product of inference. The problem for this inferential model is simple to state: though the twins are physical doppelgangers and (...) don't differ in their acoustic inputs, they differ in the interpretations they impose on their respective inputs. I argue that the inferential model does not allow for how it is the twins arrive at these different interpretations. And, since the externalist examples are compelling, this tells against the inferential model. (shrink)

This paper argues that McDowell is right to claim that disjunctivism has anti-sceptical implications. While the disjunctive conception of experience leaves unaffected the Cartesian sceptical challenge, it undermines another type of sceptical challenge. Moreover, the sceptical challenge against which disjunctivism militates has some philosophical urgency in that it threatens the very notion that perceptual experience can acquaint us with the world around us.

I present some puzzling cases regarding knowledge and its relation to rational credence. They seem to entail a failure of an apparently correct principle: if S knows P, then the epistemic justi...

Feinberg and Mallatt, in their presentation of neurobiological naturalism, have suggested that visual consciousness was acquired by early vertebrates and inherited by a wide range of descendants, and that its neural basis has shifted to nonhomologous nervous structures during evolution. However, their evolutionary scenario of visual consciousness relies on the assumption that visual consciousness is closely linked with survival, which is not commonly accepted in current consciousness research. We suggest an alternative idea that visual consciousness is linked to a specific (...) class of agency, consequently justifying their phylogenetic claim. We also examine the implication of their phylogenetic claim: visual consciousness is homologous across vertebrates, but its neural basis is not. This apparent incongruence illustrates a general phenomenon of homology, and that the resulting hierarchical view of visual consciousness and its neural basis can be straightforwardly accommodated by neurobiological naturalism. Throughout these discussions, we aim to address the potential theoretical issues in neurobiological naturalism and refine the picture illustrated by Feinberg and Mallatt regarding phylogenetic distribution and trajectories of visual consciousness. (shrink)

The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about ‘conceptualism’ and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically (...) been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars’s targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very ‘objective purport’ or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars’s critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or ‘categorial’ metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sellars’s own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars’s famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either ‘thin’ nonconceptualist views of the given, since they are ‘non-epistemic’; or alternatively, irrelevant to ‘thick’ conceptualist and phenomenological analyses –both turn out to be mistaken. (shrink)

. John Cottingham suggests that “only a traditional theistic framework may be adequate for doing justice to the role of conscience in our lives.” Two main reasons for endorsing this proposition are assessed: the religious origins of conscience, and the need to explain its normative authority. I argue that Graeco-Roman conceptions of conscience cast doubt on this first historical claim, and that secular moral realisms can account for the obligatoriness of conscience. Nevertheless, the recognition of the need for an objective (...) foundation for conscience which emerges from these debates should be embraced by both secular and religious ethicists alike. (shrink)

When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which (...) may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena. (shrink)

I explore conceptual tensions that emerge between Wilfrid Sellars’ and Grace de Laguna’s adoption of behaviorism. Despite agreeing on various points, I argue that Sellars’ and de Laguna’s positions represent a split between normativist and descriptivist approaches to explanation that are generally incompatible, and I explore how both positions claim conceptual priority.

The distinction between the space of reasons and the realm of law captures two familiar ways of making events intelligible, by reference to reasons or to natural laws, respectively. I describe a third way of making events intelligible, by explaining them in terms of an agent’s being motivated to do certain things. Explanations of this sort do not involve appealing to reasons for which the agent acts, nor to natural laws under which the event falls. To explain an event in (...) this way is to place it in the space of motivations. I outline the relation between the space of motivations and the space of reasons, and suggest that the space of motivations may serve as a common ground between the positions defended by McDowell and Dreyfus in their recent debate. (shrink)

Abstract John McDowell has claimed that the rational link between perceptions and empirical judgements allows us to perceive objects as belonging to a wider reality, one which extends beyond the objects perceived. In this way, we can be said to have a perceptual awareness of the world. I argue that McDowell's account of this perceptual awareness does not succeed. His account as it stands does not have the resources to explain how our perceptions can present objects as belonging to a (...) wider reality, regardless of the judgements we make about that reality. I suggest that we can give a better account of this perceptual awareness of the world by appealing to transcendental phenomenology. A phenomenological study of perceptual experiences describes how they are structured by a sense of the perceived objects as belonging to a world containing other objects of possible perception. I shall outline this sense we have of the world, and argue that it allows us to perceive objects as belonging to a wider reality. Transcendental phenomenology can thus help to explain our perceptual awareness of the world. (shrink)

Suppose that you are looking at a vase of flowers on the table in front of you. You can visually attend to the vase and to the flowers, noticing their different features: their colour, their shape and the way they are arranged. In attending to the vase, the flowers and their features, you are attending to mind-independent objects and features. Suppose, now, that you introspectively reflect on the visual experience you have when looking at the vase of flowers. In doing (...) so, you might notice various features of your experience, for example that individual petals on the flowers are difficult to distinguish. Although in introspection your interest is in the character of your experience, your attention is still to the objects of your experience – to the mind-independent vase and the flowers. Since attending to your experience involves attending to the mind-independent objects and features of your experience, your experience seems introspectively to involve those mind-independent objects and features. 2In general, then, when we introspect a visual experiential episode, it seems that we are related to some mind-independent object or feature that is present and is a part, or a constituent, of the experience. We can call this property – the property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent – the naïve realist property of experiences. It is widely accepted that visual experiences seem to have the NR property; 3 naïve realism is the view that some experiences – the veridical ones – actually do have it: " veridical experiential episodes have mind-independent objects and features as constituents."On a plausible conception of phenomenal character, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience just is those properties of the experience that explain the way it introspectively seems. Naïve realism is then the view that veridical …. (shrink)

According to a bodily view of pain, pains are objects which are located in body parts. This bodily view is supported by the locative locutions for pain in English, such as that “I have a pain in my back.” Recently, Liu and Klein (Analysis, 80(2), 262–272, 2020) carry out a cross-linguistic analysis, and they claim that (1) Mandarin has no locative locutions for pain and (2) the absence of locative locutions for pain puts the bodily view at risk. This paper (...) rejects both claims. Regarding the philosophical claim, I argue that a language without locative locutions for pain only poses a limited challenge to the bodily view. Regarding the empirical claim, I identify the possible factors which might have misled Liu and Klein about the locative locutions for pain in Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has a wide range of locative locutions for pain by conducting a corpus analysis. I conclude that compared to English, Mandarin lends no less, if not more, support to the bodily view of pain. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenological properties of a perceptual experience supervene on its intentional properties. The paper presents a counter-example to this claim, one that concerns visual grouping phenomenology. I argue that this example is superior to superficially similar examples involving grouping phenomenology offered by Peacocke (Sense and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press), because the standard intentionalist responses to Peacocke’s examples cannot be extended to mine. If Intentionalism fails, it is impossible to reduce the phenomenology of an experience (...) to its content. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt has become standard to treat Kant’s characterization of pure apperception as involving the claim that questions about what I think are transparent to questions about the world. By contra...

An influential thesis in contemporary philosophy of mind is that subjectivity is best conceived as inner awareness of qualia. has argued that this unique subjective awareness generates a paradox which resists empirical explanation. On account of this “paradox of subjective duality,” Levine concludes that the hardest part of the hard problem of consciousness is to explain how anything like a subjective point of view could arise in the world. Against this, I argue that the nature of subjective thought is not (...) correctly characterized as inner awareness, that a non-paradoxical approach to the first-person perspective is available, and that the problem about subjectivity should be distinguished from the perennial problem of qualia or phenomenal properties. (shrink)

It is widely thought that Augustine thinks perception is, in some distinctive sense, an active process and that he takes conscious awareness to be constitutive of perception. I argue that conscious awareness is not straightforwardly constitutive of perception and that Augustine is best understood as an indirect realist. I then clarify Augustine’s views concerning the nature and role of diachronically unified conscious awareness and mental representation in perception, the nature of the soul’s intentio, and the precise sense in which perception (...) is an active process. (shrink)