When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but (...) from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "[ Philosophical Remarks ] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind . He modifies the Tractatus 's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."--Robert Hoffman, Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."--Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association. (shrink)

In interpretations of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section of the first Critique, there is a widespread tendency to present Kant as establishing that the representation of space is a condition for individuating or distinguishing objects, and to claim that it is on this basis that Kant establishes the apriority of this representation. The aim of this paper is to criticize this way of interpreting the "Aesthetic," and to defend an alternative interpretation. On this alternative, questions about the formation of the representation (...) of space figure more centrally, and the anti-Leibnizian character of Kant 's argument can be properly appreciated. (shrink)

I propose a new argument showing that conscious vision sometimes depends constitutively on conscious attention. I criticise traditional arguments for this constitutive connection, on the basis that they fail adequately to dissociate evidence about visual consciousness from evidence about attention. On the same basis, I criticise Ned Block's recent counterargument that conscious vision is independent of one sort of attention (‘cognitive access'). Block appears to achieve the dissociation only because he underestimates the indeterminacy of visual consciousness. I then appeal to (...) empirical work on the interaction between visual indeterminacy and attention, to argue for the constitutive connection. (shrink)

Many philosophers have held that it is not possible to experience a spatial object, property, or relation except against the background of an intact awareness of a space that is somehow ‘absolute’. This paper challenges that claim, by analyzing in detail the case of a brain-damaged subject whose visual experiences seem to have violated this condition: spatial objects and properties were present in his visual experience, but space itself was not. I go on to suggest that phenomenological argumentation can give (...) us a kind of evidence about the nature of the mind even if this evidence is not absolutely incorrigible. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper I offer an account of a particular variety of perception of absence, namely, visual perception of empty space. In so doing, I aim to make explicit the role that seeing empty space has, implicitly, in Mike Martin's account of the visual field. I suggest we should make sense of the claim that vision has a field—in Martin's sense—in terms of our being aware of its limitations or boundaries. I argue that the limits of the visual field (...) are our own sensory limitations, and that we are aware of them as such. Seeing empty space, I argue, involves a structural feature of experience that constitutes our awareness of our visual sensory limitations, and thus, in virtue of which vision has a field. (shrink)

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

In what sense does empty space feature in visual experience? In the first part of this essay I sketch a view advanced by Soteriou and Richardson on which one's visual awareness of empty space is explained by appeal to ‘structural’ features of the phenomenology of visual experience, in particular the phenomenology of experiencing one's visual field as bounded. I suggest that although this ‘structuralist’ view is silent on whether empty space has a phenomenal appearance, the very appeal to structural features (...) seems a natural foil to some such thought. In the second part, I outline a view on which it can be granted that empty space does, after all, have a phenomenal appearance and, so, is not best cast as a species of absence perception as the structuralist avows, at least on a certain construal of ‘absence perception’. After O'Shaughnessy , I contend that although some privations have a phenomenal appearance, ‘absence perception’ should single out the putative perception of phenomena that lack phenomenal reality. I finally consider how the descriptive phenomenology that the structuralist points to, and which I urge should be embraced, can nonetheless be reconciled with the view I spell out. (shrink)

An epistemological how-possible question asks how knowledge, or knowledge of some specific kind, is possible. Familiar epistemological how-possible questions include ‘How is knowledge of the external world possible?’, ‘How is knowledge of other minds possible?’ and ‘How is a priori knowledge possible?’ These are the three questions that I tackle in my book. In each case, I explain how and why the question arises and propose a way of answering it. The main negative claim of the book is that transcendental (...) arguments are of little use in answering how-possible questions. A transcendental demonstration of the necessity of a certain kind of knowledge does not amount to an explanation of its possibility. The main positive claim is that such questions call for what I describe as a multi-levels response. I give an account of the multi-levels approach and put it to use in explaining how various kinds of knowledge are possible.Epistemological how-possible questions are not directly concerned with whether knowledge is possible, but if we cannot explain how a certain kind of knowledge is possible then the reality of that kind of knowledge is called into question. How-possible questions are obstacle-dependent. We ask how knowledge …. (shrink)

I focus on two questions: what is knowledge, and how is knowledge possible? The latter is an example of a how-possible question. I argue that how-possible questions are obstacle-dependent and that they need to be dealt with at three different levels, the level of means, of obstacle-removal, and of enabling conditions. At the first of these levels the possibility of knowledge is accounted for by identifying means of knowing, and I argue that the identification of such means also contributes to (...) a proper understanding of what knowledge is. (shrink)

I set out two theses. The first is Lynn Robertson’s: (a) spatial awareness is a cause of object perception. A natural counterpoint is: (b) spatial awareness is a cause of your ability to make accurate verbal reports about a perceived object. Zenon Pylyshyn has criticized both. I argue that nonetheless, the burden of the evidence supports both (a) and (b). Finally, I argue conscious visual perception of an object has a different causal role to both: (i) non-conscious perception of the (...) object, and (ii) experience, e.g. hallucination, that may be subjectively indiscriminable from, but is not, perception of the object. (shrink)

This is a translation of Edmund HusserI's lecture course from the Summer semester 1907 at the University of Gottingen. The German original was pub lished posthumously in 1973 as Volume XVI of Husserliana, Husserl's opera omnia. The translation is complete, including both the main text and the supplementary texts (as Husserliana volumes are usually organized), except for the critical apparatus which provides variant readings. The announced title of the lecture course was "Main parts of the phenome nology and critique of (...) reason." The course began with five, relatively inde pendent, introductory lectures. These were published on their own in 1947, bearing the title The idea ojphenomenology.l The "Five Lectures" comprise a general orientation by proposing the method to be employed in the subsequent working out of the actual problems (viz., the method of "phenomenological reduction") and by clarifying, at least provisionally, some technical terms that will be used in the labor the subsequent lectures will carry out. The present volume, then, presents that labor, i.e., the method in action and the results attained. As such, this text dispels the abstract impression which could not help but cling to the first five lectures taken in isolation. Accord ingly, we are here given genuine "introductory lectures," i.e., an introduction to phenomenology in the genuine phenomenological sense of engaging in the work of phenomenology, going to the "matters at issue themselves," rather than remaining aloof from them in abstract considerations of standpoint and approach. (shrink)

Matthew Soteriou provides an original philosophical account of sensory and cognitive aspects of consciousness. He explores distinctions of temporal character in our mental lives--especially in relation to the exercise of agency--and illuminates the more general issue of the place and role of mental action in the metaphysics of mind.

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. For this new edition, a very substantial and illustrated epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition.

The first major section of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Aesthetic, is concerned with the nature of space and time, and with the nature of our representation of them. In interpretations of this part of the Critique, there is a very widespread tendency to present Kant’s discussion of space as attempting to establish that the representation of space is a condition for individuating or distinguishing objects, and that it is on this basis that Kant establishes the apriority of (...) this representation. I believe that this way of interpreting the Aesthetic is wholly misguided. The interpretive tendency I have in mind takes a number of different forms. On one approach, the role of space is to allow us to distinguish objects even if they are qualitatively identical. This represents Kant as making a certain kind of anti-Leibnizian point, one that concerns Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. On another approach, space—or something closely analogous to space—is regarded as essential on account of its role in allowing us to re-identify objects over time. Interpretations of Kant that follow the second approach are largely inspired by Strawson’s discussions of these matters in chapter 2 of Individuals. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the causal requirements on perceptual success in putative cases of the perception of absence – in particular, in cases of hearing silence and seeing darkness. It is argued that the key to providing the right account of the respect in which we can perceive silence and darkness lies in providing the right account of the respect in which we can have conscious perceptual contact with intervals of time and regions of space within which objects can potentially be (...) perceived. In this account, a significant explanatory role is assigned to comparatively invariant structural features of our conscious experience of regions of space and intervals of time. The chapter discusses how the explanatory role assigned to these structural features affects our view of the causal requirements on perceptual success. (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. It presents a model for understanding the visual processing underlying perception and action, proposing a broad distinction within the brain between two kinds of vision: conscious perception and unconscious 'online' vision. It argues that each kind of vision can occur quasi-independently of the other, and is separately handled by a quite different processing system. In the 11 years since publication, the book has provoked (...) considerable interest and debate - throughout both cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, while the field has continued to flourish and develop. -/- For this new edition, the text from the original edition has been left untouched, standing as a coherent statement of the authors' position. However, a very substantial epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review some of the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition. The new chapter summarizes developments in various relevant areas of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. It notably supplements the main text by updating the reader on the contributions that have emerged from the use of functional neuroimaging, which was in its infancy when the first edition was written. Neuroimaging, and functional MRI in particular, has revolutionized the field over the past 11 years by allowing investigators to plot in detail the patterns of activity within the visual brains of behaving and perceiving humans. The authors show how its use now allows scientists to test and confirm their proposals, based as they then were largely on evidence accrued from primate neuroscience in conjunction with studies of neurological patients. (shrink)