Elements of Mind (EM) has two themes, one major and one minor. The major theme is intentionality, the mind’s direction upon its objects; the other is the mind–body problem. I treat these themes separately: chapters 1, and 3–5 are concerned with intentionality, while chapter 2 is about the mind–body problem. In this summary I will first describe my view of the mind–body problem, and then describe the book’s main theme. Like many philosophers, I see the mind–body problem as containing two (...) sub–problems: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. I see these problems forming the two horns of a dilemma. Just as the problem of mental causation pushes us towards physicalism, so the problem of consciousness pushes us away from it. Each problem reveals the inadequacy of the solution to the other. Essentially the problem of mental causation is the conflict between (i) the apparent fact that mental states and events have effects in the physical world and (ii) a general principle about the causal nature of the physical world, which is sometimes called the ‘causal closure’ or the ‘causal completeness’ of the physical world. This principle says that all physical effects have physical causes which are enough to bring them about. The problem then is simple: how can a mental cause have a physical effect if that effect also has a physical cause which is enough to bring it about? Barring massive overdetermination of our actions by independent causes, it seems that the best answer is to identify the mental and the physical causes. And this is traditionally how physicalists have argued for their identity theory of mind and body. However, many physicalists reject the identity theory, and therefore they have to solve the mental causation problem in some other way. At present, there is no consensus among physicalists on which of the currently proposed solutions is correct. In chapter 2 of EM I propose an alternative, which I call ‘emergentism’. Inspired by the rejection of the identity theory, Emergentism is the idea that mental properties are genu.. (shrink)

Philosophers of art use the term ‘seeing-in’ to describe an important part of our experience of pictures: we often ‘see’ a picture’s subject matter ‘in’ its surface. This paper proposes that seeing-in is illuminated by a perceptual phenomenon that has received extensive attention in perceptual psychology: the perception of transparency. It is generally accepted that transparency perception is governed by laws of ‘scission’. I argue that some instances of seeing-in can be straightforwardly understood as a kind of transparency effect, and (...) that all seeing-in is illuminated by these laws. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed new light on certain philosophical theories of perceptual experience by examining the semantics of perceptual ascriptions such as “Jones sees an apple.” I start with the assumption, recently defended elsewhere, that perceptual ascriptions lend themselves to intensional readings. In the first part of the paper, I defend three theses regarding such readings: I) intensional readings of perceptual ascriptions ascribe phenomenal properties, II) perceptual verbs are not ambiguous between intensional and extensional readings, and III) intensional perceptual (...) ascriptions have a relational form. The second part of the paper describes the implications of I-III for theories of perceptual experience. I argue that I-III support and reconcile the three main views of perceptual experience, relationalism, disjunctivism, and representationalism. However, I-III leave open at least one important point of contention: particularism, the view that we experience external objects. I conclude by exploring the implications of accepting or denying particularism given I-III. (shrink)

When we see something in a picture, do we enjoy visual experience as of the depicted object? Gombrichians say yes: when viewing ordinary pictures we simultaneously see the picture and seem to see its object. But why, then, isn’t seeing-in contradictory, and how are these two elements somehow integrated into a single experience? Gombrichians’ attempts to answer appeal either to our awareness of the picture’s design, or to the idea that picture and object are not given as in the same (...) place. I argue that neither answer is successful, and thus that Gombrichianism is false. (shrink)

This chapter concentrates on the nature of the image as it presents itself in experience, with its remarkable capacity to represent within itself people, events, emotions, and many other things, and with its place in art. The Husserlian perspective has many affinities with more recent investigations of images. The physical dimension of image plays an important role in imaging and has been largely neglected by philosophers, though not by artists. The uniqueness of image consciousness rests in its ability to see (...) something in something else. Then, the chapter assesses the differences between image consciousness and symbolic or signitive consciousness. The resemblance in image consciousness must precisely not be perfect; it must be paired with and permeated by difference and even conflict. Images improve experience by folding into themselves the world. (shrink)

Robert Hopkins’s Picture, Image and Experience aims to provide an account of pictorial representation that vindicates the intuitions of the many, namely that pictorial representation is a deeply visual phenomenon, that an explanation of pictorial representation needs to be based on an explanation of our experience of pictures, and that there must be some sense in the idea that pictures resemble their objects. Hopkins proposes that we can show what is correct in these intuitions by explaining pictures as representations that (...) depend on a distinctive sort of perceptual experience: experienced resemblance in outline shape between a picture and its object. Experienced resemblance in outline shape is the experience of sameness of the solid angle subtended by the contours on the pictorial surface and the solid angle subtended by the actual depicted objects. Pictures don’t resemble their objects but they are experienced as such and it is sameness of outline shape or sameness of subtended solid angles that secures this experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to show that the so-called intentionalist programme, according to which the qualitative aspects of the mental have to be brought back to its intentional features, is doomed to fail. For, pace Brentano, the property that constitutes the main part of such intentional features, i.e., intentionality, is not the mark of the mental, neither in the proper Brentanian sense, according to which intentionality is the both necessary and sufficient condition of the mental, nor in its ‘watered (...) down’ counterpart recently defended by Tim Crane, according to which intentionality is just the necessary condition of the mental. However, this does not mean that being mental is just a heterogenous category. For there may be another mark of the mental, i.e., consciousness, in the phenomenological sense of the property of being experienced. (shrink)