Logical Atomism is a philosophy that sought to account for the world in all its various aspects by relating it to the structure of the language in which we articulate information. In _The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,_ Bertrand Russell, with input from his young student Ludwig Wittgenstein, developed the concept and argues for a reformed language based on pure logic. Despite Russell’s own future doubts surrounding the concept, this founding and definitive work in analytical philosophy by one of the world’s (...) most significant philosophers is a remarkable attempt to establish a novel way of thinking. (shrink)

Intentionality is a mark of the mental, as Brentano (1874) noted. Any representation or conception of anything has the feature of intentionality, which informally put, is the feature of being about something that may or may not exist. Visual artworks are about something, whether something literal or abstract. The artwork is a mentalized physical object. Aesthetic experience of the artwork illustrates the nature of intentionality as we focus attention on the phenomenology of the sensory exemplar. This focus of attention on (...) the exemplar in aesthetic experience simultaneously exhibits what the intentional object is like and what our conception of it is like. The exemplar is Janus-faced, looking in one direction outward toward the objects conceived and in the other direction inward toward our conceiving of them. It shows us what intentionality is like and how we know it. (shrink)

This chapter discusses several theses that are part of the commonsense conception of color as articulated by Mark Johnston, including paradigms, explanation, unity, perceptual availability, and revelation. It focuses on the last doctrine, which contends that the intrinsic nature of canary yellow is fully revealed by a standard visual experience as of a canary yellow thing. Science delivers a variety of relational facts about colors. These physical, psychophysical, neuropsychological, and semantic facts are interesting and important, but are entirely beside the (...) point of knowing what the colors are in and of themselves. What redness is in itself can only be learned in an experience as of a red thing. What is thus learned, what the quality is intrinsically, leaves nothing for a scientific theory to complete, revise, or even enhance. (shrink)