Several disputes about the nature of experience operate under the assumption that experiences have parts, including temporal parts. There's the widely held view, when it comes to temporal experiences, that we should follow James' exhortation that such experiences aren't mere successions of their temporal parts, but something more. And there's the question of whether it is the parts of experiences which determine whole experiences and the properties they have, or whether the determination goes instead from the whole to the parts, (...) as holists have it. But what are parts, or temporal parts, of experiences exactly—what does it mean to say that an experience is “part” of another? Are the participants in those disputes talking about the same thing—is there a univocal notion of “experiential part” available? Are there different kinds of experiential parts? And if there are, is there a systematic way of carving them out? More importantly, how should we conceive of the temporal parts of experiences, and how can we establish that experiences really do have temporal parts, against those who reject the notion? (shrink)

This paper offers a new argument in favour of experiential pluralism about visual experience – the view that the nature of successful visual experience is different from the nature of unsuccessful visual experience. The argument appeals to the role of experience in explaining possession of ordinary abilities. In addition, the paper makes a methodological point about philosophical debates concerning the nature of perceptual experience: whether a given view about the nature of experience amounts to an interesting and substantive thesis (...) about our own minds depends on the significance of the psychological or mental kind claim made by it. This means that an adequate defence of a given view of the nature of experience must include articulation of the latter's significance qua psychological or mental kind. The argument advanced provides the material to meet this demand. In turn, this constitutes further support for the argument itself. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to argue that the difference between creative and non-creative mental processes is not a functional/computational, but an experiential one. In other words, what is distinctive about creative mental processes is not the functional/computational mechanism that leads to the emergence of a creative idea, be it the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space, but the way in which this mental process is experienced. The explanatory power of the functional/computational theories (...) and the experiential account is compared and it is pointed out that if creativity is a natural kind, it is not a functional/computational, but an experiential natural kind. (shrink)

The goal of this chapter is to provide an interpretation of experiential learning that fully detaches itself from the epistemological presuppositions of empiricist and intellectualist accounts of learning. I first introduce the concept of schema as understood by Kant and I explain how it is related to the problems implied by the empiricist and intellectualist frameworks. I then interpret David Kolb’s theory of learning that is based on the concept of learning cycle and represents an attempt to overcome the (...) corresponding drawbacks of these frameworks. I show that Kolb’s theory fails to achieve its goal because it is rooted in some of the fundamental epistemological presuppositions of these frameworks. Subsequently, I present a group of works from phenomenology, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s, in order to show that Kolb’s attempt is insufficient due to a lack of understanding of the problem expressed by Kant via the concept of schema. Finally, I outline an interpretation of experiential learning as differentiation of experiential schemas and explain how it meets the epistemological challenges outlined above. (shrink)

Synesthesia is the “union of the senses” whereby two or more of the five senses that are normally experienced separately are involuntarily and automatically joined together in experience. For example, some synesthetes experience a color when they hear a sound or see a letter. In this paper, I examine two cases of synesthesia in light of the notions of “experiential parts” and “conscious unity.” I first provide some background on the unity of consciousness and the question of experiential (...) parts. I then describe two very different cases of synesthesia. Finally, I critically examine the cases in light of two central notions of “unity.” I argue that there is good reason to think that the neural “vehicles” of conscious states are distributed widely and can include multiple modalities. I also argue that some synesthetic experiences do not really enjoy the same “object unity” associated with normal vision. (shrink)

Sight is a capacity, and seeing is its exercise. Reflection on the sense in which sight is for the sake of seeing reveals distinct relations of dependence between sight and seeing, the capacity and its exercise. Moreover, these relations of dependence in turn reveal the nature of our perceptual capacities and their exercise. Specifically, if sight is for the sake of seeing, then sight will depend, in a certain sense, upon seeing, in a manner inconsistent with experiential monism. Thus (...) reflection on the power of perception forms the basis of an argument for experiential pluralism. (shrink)

The Elephant and the Blind is a book about why we need a new culture of consciousness, and how to get it. A culture of consciousness (or Bewusstseinskultur) is a culture that values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way.

Thesis on metaphysics featuring Galen Strawson and Noam Chomsky. I discuss Strawsons' Materialism, panpsychism and the topic of reference. I compare Strawson's view with Chomsky's in relation to panpsychism, the nature of reference and the limits of human understanding by reviewing important historical events in the history of philosophy. I also cover some aspects of neuroscience to see if empirical evidence in any way contradicts the claims made by Strawson and Chomsky. I conclude by recasting the questions of metaphysics (...) under an epistemological framework. (shrink)

In the past four years, a small but intense debate has transpired on the margins of mainstream scholarship in the discipline of Philosophy, particularly within the sub-field of American pragmatism. While most philosophical pragmatists dedicate their attention to questions concerning how ideas improve experience (or the theory-practice continuum), those participating in this exchange have shown greater concern for an issue that is, at its core, a theoretical matter: Does the theory of experience espoused by the classic American philosopher John (...) Dewey succumb to what contemporary analytic philosophers—for instance, Wilfred Sellars, Donald Davidson and John McDowell—call the Myth of the Given? One commentator, Scott Aikin, claims that Dewey relied on non-inferential and non-conceptual content or givens as perceptual inputs for cognitive experience. The upshot of Aikin’s objection is that these experiential givens constitute a proxy epistemological foundation for the beliefs that flow from inquiry—a position clearly in conflict with Dewey’s commitment to anti-foundationalism. The objection assumes a slightly different form in the hands of another scholar of American pragmatism, Colin Koopman. Gregory Pappas and David Hildebrand respond to Koopman’s version of the objection. The goals of this essay are to clarify the objection, highlight the stakes in the debate, identify misunderstandings of Dewey’s experiential metaphysics on both sides, and determine why the experiential givenism objection merits serious philosophical scrutiny in the future. (shrink)

Experiential acquaintance is an alleged relation between ourselves and our experiences that has sometimes been hypothesised as necessary for knowledge of our experiences. This paper begins with a clarification of ‘acquaintance’ and an explanation of ‘experience’ that focuses attention on a famous, but flawed, argument by G. E. Moore. It goes on to critically examine several recent arguments concerning experiential acquaintance and to show how internalist foundationalism can respond to a famous Sellarsian dilemma without appeal to a relation (...) of acquaintance with our experiences. It concludes that we can dispense with experiential acquaintance. (shrink)

: Experiential acquaintance is an alleged relation between ourselves and our experiences that has sometimes been hypothesized as necessary for knowledge of our experiences. This paper begins with a clarification of ‘acquaintance’ and an explanation of ‘experience’ that focuses attention on a famous, but flawed, argument by G. E. Moore. It goes on to critically examine several recent arguments concerning experiential acquaintance and to show how internalist foundationalism can respond to a famous Sellarsian dilemma without appeal to a (...) relation of acquaintance with our experiences. It concludes that we can dispense with experiential acquaintance. (shrink)

In A Priori Justification, Albert Casullo argues that extant attempts to explicate experiential justification—by stipulation, introspection, conceptual analysis, thought experimentation, and/or appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases—are unsuccessful. He draws the following conclusion: “armchair methods” such as these are inadequate to the task. Instead, empirical methods should be used to investigate the distinction between experiential and non-experiential justification and to address questions concerning the nature, extent, and existence of the a priori. In this essay, I show that (...) Casullo has not refuted armchair explications of experiential justification, in particular those that appeal to introspectively accessible phenomenology. I do this by presenting a phenomenal theory of experiential justification that (a) has a significant degree of initial plausibility and (b) survives Casullo’s general attack on such theories. As a result, a premise in the central argument for Casullo’s signature proposal concerning the a priori is undermined. (shrink)

Indian philosophy is a term that refers to schools of philosophical thought that originated in the Indian continent. Buddhism is one of the important school of Indian philosophical thought. Happiness is much pursued by individuals and society in all cultures. Eastern and western cultures have understood well-being and evolved ways and means to promote well-being over the years. Buddhism pursues happiness by using knowledge and practice to achieve mental equanimity. In Buddhism, equanimity, or peace of mind, is achieved by (...) detaching oneself from the cycle of craving that produces dukkha. So by achieving a mental state where you can detach from all the passions, needs and wants of life, you free yourself and achieve a state of transcendent bliss and well-being. The journey to attain a deeper form of happiness requires an unflinching look into the face of a reality where all life is seen as dukkha or mental dysfunction. Buddhism is a philosophy and practice that is extremely concerned with the mind and its various delusions, misunderstandings and cravings but, happily for us, sees a way out through higher consciousness and mindful practice. Perhaps it is because of this seemingly dim view of reality that happiness in Buddhism is so tremendously full; the ideas contained in Buddha's teachings point to a thorough engagement with lived reality. Ironically, it is through such an engagement with one's self, the world and reality that one is able to achieve a transcendent happiness. Equanimity, a deep sense of wellbeing and happiness, is attainable through proper knowledge and practice in everyday life. The objective of this paper is to the study the conception of happiness Buddhist philosophy. This paper is divided into four parts (i) meaning of Indian philosophy and its relation with Indian psychology, (ii) Buddhist philosophy, (iii) Buddhist conception of happiness and (iv) relevance of Buddhism in present day world. (shrink)

Some views of holism fail to fully encapsulate the structure and independence of consciousness while others are reductionist in their insistence on a strict structure. After examining holism and mental state consciousness, I move to my own proposal for the structure of consciousness: experiential swaths. By highlighting the phenomenal interdependence of some aspects of consciousness without conceding that all aspects are so strongly intertwined, experiential swaths allow for further conceptual structurization within consciousness.

We investigate the fundamental relationship between philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of nature, arguing for a position in which the latter encompasses the former. Two traditions are set against each other, one is natural aesthetics, whose covering philosophy is Idealism, and the other is the aesthetics of nature, the position defended in this article, with the general program of a comprehensive philosophy of nature as its covering theory. Our approach is philosophical, operating within the framework of the (...) ontology of the process of the production of art, especially the views of Antonin Artaud, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. We interrogate Dilthey and Worringer while outlining an ontology of art based on the production of nonhuman images and a nonpersonal experiential field of nature. (shrink)

Donald Davidson’s epistemology is predicated on, among other things, the rejection of Experiential Foundationalism, which he calls ‘unintelligible’. In this essay, I assess Davidson’s arguments for this conclusion. I conclude that each of them fails on the basis of reasons that foundationalists and antifoundationalists alike can, and should, accept.

This paper argues that philosophers can live a deep spiritual life of a certain kind, spirituality being understood here in line with the Christian tradition. The first step in the argument distinguishes between two kinds of philosophy: the representational kind and the sapiential kind. Representation is often associated with scientifically inclined philosophers while wisdom is associated with philosophers whose inclination is to show others how to live a good life. The paper then proceeds by showing that this distinction reflects (...) a similar one in the realm of Christian spirituality. One can distinguish between a Thomistic view and an Ignatian view, the former characterized by a certain caution as regards interacting with the world, while the latter characterized by a certain heuristic courage as regards such interaction. This latter mode of spirituality is called experiential because of its appreciation of experience as a source of insight. The upshot is that the intellectual life in general, and certainly philosophy in particular, can leave its beneficial imprint on the person as a whole, including body and soul, thought and feeling, contemplation and action. (shrink)

These essays are about education, learning, rational inquiry, philosophy, science studies, problem solving, academic inquiry, global problems, wisdom and, above all, the urgent need for an academic revolution. Despite this range and diversity of topics, there is a common underlying theme. Education ought to be devoted, much more than it is, to the exploration real-life, open problems; it ought not to be restricted to learning up solutions to already solved problems - especially if nothing is said about the problems (...) that provoked the solutions in the first place. There should be much more emphasis on learning how to engage in cooperatively rational exploration of problems: even five year olds could begin to learn how to do this. A central task of philosophy ought to be to keep alive awareness of our unsolved fundamental problems - especially our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others: How can our human world - and the world of sentient life more generally - imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is both our fundamental intellectual problem and our fundamental problem of living. As far as the latter is concerned, we are at present heading towards disaster - as our immense, unsolved global problems tell us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, vast inequalities of wealth and power around the world, pollution of earth, sea and air, our proclivity for war, and above all global warming. If we are to resolve our conflicts and global problems more intelligently, effectively and humanely than we have managed to do so far, then we have to learn how to do it. That, in turn, requires that our institutions of learning, our universities and schools, are rationally designed and devoted to the task. At present they are not. That is the crisis behind all the others. From the past we have inherited the idea that the basic intellectual aim of inquiry ought to be to acquire knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; then, secondarily, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this is dangerously and damagingly irrational, and it is this irrationality that is, in part, responsible for the genesis of our current global problems, and our current incapacity to solve them. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to transform academia so that it becomes rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to make progress towards as good and wise a world as possible. This would involve putting problems of living - including global problems - at the heart of academia, problems of knowledge and technological know-how emerging out of, and feeding back into, the central task to help people tackle problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. Almost every department and aspect of academia needs to change. We need a new kind of academic inquiry devoted, not just to knowledge, but rather to wisdom - wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. So, this is what these essays seek to provoke: a concerted effort to transform our institutions of learning so that they become rationally and effectively devoted to helping us learn how to create a wiser world. With these essays before me, I can see that there is one crucial element of learning about which they say nothing - or nothing explicit. The vital role of play in learning. All mammals - or at any rate almost all mammals - learn by means of play. Cats, tigers, foxes and other predators learn to hunt by means of endless mock fights when kittens and cubs. Deer, sheep and antelope learn to escape by means of playful leaps and bounds when young. We are mammals too. Almost certainly, we learnt how to be adult human beings by means of play during the millions of years we evolved into homo sapiens living in hunting and gathering tribes. Children today, out of school, learn by means of play. Learning by means of play is almost certainly fundamental to our makeup. Education needs to exploit it. Schools and universities need to become places of play. Successful problem solving is often likely to be playful in character. The youthful Einstein called doing physics "getting up to mischief". But our most serious problems of living are so grim, so imbued with suffering, wasted lives and unnecessary death that the idea of approaching them in a playful spirit seems sacrilegious. We need to keep alive tackling of intellectual problems so that playful capacities can be exercised - if for no other reason (and other reasons there are, of course, aplenty). There are two really worthy impulses behind all rational inquiry: delight and compassion. (shrink)

In this article, we reflect on our experiences teaching a PWOL course called Philosophy for Living. The course uses modules focused on different historical philosophical ways of life (Epicureanism, Stoicism, Confucianism, Existentialism, etc.) to engage students in exploring how philosophy can be a way of life and how its methods, virtues, and ideas can improve their own lives. We describe and compare our experiences with two central aspects of our approach: engagement with diversity and the use of immersive (...) experiences and assignments. In particular, we discuss how we recognize and center various forms of diversity in philosophy—cultural and gender diversity, but also diversity in how and in what forms philosophy can be done and what “philosophy as a way of life” can be. We also examine how the experimental and experiential aspects of immersive assignments promote deeper understanding and create possibilities for personal transformation. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions: What is the role of consciousness in the creative process? How does the audience for a work for art influence its creation? How can creativity emerge through childhood pretending? Do great works of literature give us insight into human nature? Can a computer program really be (...) creative? How do we define creativity in the first place? Is it a virtue? What is the difference between creativity in science and art? Can creativity be taught? The new essays that comprise The Philosophy of Creativity take up these and other key questions and, in doing so, illustrate the value of interdisciplinary exchange. Written by leading philosophers and psychologists involved in studying creativity, the essays integrate philosophical insights with empirical research. CONTENTS I. Introduction Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman II. The Concept of Creativity 1. An Experiential Account of Creativity Bence Nanay III. Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art 2. Creativity and Insight Gregory Currie 3. The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers and/or Listeners Use their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks Noël Carroll 4. The Products of Musical Creativity Christopher Peacocke IV. Ethics & Value Theory 5. Performing Oneself Owen Flanagan 6. Creativity as a Virtue of Character Matthew Kieran V. Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science 7. Creativity and Not So Dumb Luck Simon Blackburn 8. The Role of Imagination in Creativity Dustin Stokes 9. Creativity, Consciousness, and Free Will: Evidence from Psychology Experiments Roy F. Baumeister, Brandon J. Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall 10. The Origins of Creativity Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers 11. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: a Contradiction in Terms? Margaret Boden VI. Philosophy of Science 12. Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Dean Keith Simonton VII. Philosophy of Education (& Education of Philosophy) 13. Educating for Creativity Berys Gaut 14. Philosophical Heuristics Alan Hájek. (shrink)

This book gives an account of work that I have done over a period of decades that sets out to solve two fundamental problems of philosophy: the mind-body problem and the problem of induction. Remarkably, these revolutionary contributions to philosophy turn out to have dramatic implications for a wide range of issues outside philosophy itself, most notably for the capacity of humanity to resolve current grave global problems and make progress towards a better, wiser world. A key (...) element of the proposed solution to the first problem is that physics is about only a highly specialized aspect of all that there is – the causally efficacious aspect. Once this is understood, it ceases to be a mystery that natural science says nothing about the experiential aspect of reality, the colours we perceive, the inner experiences we are aware of. That natural science is silent about the experiential aspect of reality is no reason whatsoever to hold that the experiential does not objectively exist. A key element of the proposed solution to the second problem is that physics, in persistently accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a substantial metaphysical assumption about the universe: it is such that a unified pattern of physical law runs through all phenomena. We need a new conception, and kind, of physics that acknowledges, and actively seeks to improve, metaphysical presuppositions inherent in the methods of physics. The problematic aims and methods of physics need to be improved as physics proceeds. These are the ideas that have fruitful implications, I set out to show, for a wide range of issues: for philosophy itself, for physics, for natural science more generally, for the social sciences, for education, for the academic enterprise as a whole and, most important of all, for the capacity of humanity to learn how to solve the grave global problems that menace our future, and thus make progress to a better, wiser world. It is not just science that has problematic aims; in life too our aims, whether personal, social or institutional, are all too often profoundly problematic, and in urgent need of improvement. We need a new kind of academic enterprise which helps humanity put aims-and-methods improving meta-methods into practice in personal and social life, so that we may come to do better at achieving what is of value in life, and make progress towards a saner, wiser world. This body of work of mine has met with critical acclaim. Despite that, astonishingly, it has been ignored by mainstream philosophy. In the book I discuss the recent work of over 100 philosophers on the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of science, and show that my earlier, highly relevant work on these issues is universally ignored, the quality of subsequent work suffering as a result. My hope, in publishing this book, is that my fellow philosophers will come to appreciate the intellectual value of my proposed solutions to the mind-body problem and the problem of induction, and will, as a result, join with me in attempting to convince our fellow academics that we need to bring about an intellectual/institutional revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to solve problems of living, including global problems, and make progress towards as good, as wise and enlightened a world as possible. (shrink)

One of the intellectual giants in church history who first utilized philosophy to embark on the depths of faith was St. Augustine of Hippo (a.D. 354 - 430). But what had prompted Augustine to approach faith through philosophy? What is his conception of faith? How did he arrive at a deeper and better understanding of faith via philosophy? In this paper, I will explore the saint's philosophy of faith and argue that in Augustine, we can find (...) not just one but three levels of faith, namely: the regula or doctrina fidei, the intelligentsia fidei, and the experiential fidei. And for Augustine, the highest level of faith can only be had not through any intellectual efforts but solely through charity or concrete acts of love. (shrink)

The thesis of experiential revelation—Rev for brevity—in the philosophy of mind claims that to have an experience—i.e., to be acquainted with it—is to know its nature. It is widely agreed that although at least moderate versions of Rev might strike one as plausible and perhaps even appealing, at least up to a certain extent, most of them are nonetheless inconsistent with almost any coherent form of physicalism about the mind. Thus far, the issue of the alleged tension between (...) Rev and physicalism has mostly been put in the relevant literature in terms of phenomenal concepts—those concepts which refer to phenomenal properties, or qualia, and characterize them in terms of the peculiar quality(ies) they exhibit—and some kind of “special feature” those concepts allegedly possess. I call this version of Rev C-Rev. This paper aims to suggest that while it is true that phenomenal concepts reveal the nature of their referent(s)—i.e., it is a priori, for a subject possessing the concept and just in virtue of possessing it, what it is for the referent(s) of the concept to be part of reality—this feature of them, in turn, rests on a non-conceptual non-propositional kind of knowledge, namely, sui generis introspective knowledge by acquaintance of one’s own phenomenally conscious states. I call this version of Rev A-Rev. §1 provides some introductory material. In §2 I discuss two arguments that have recently been put forth to undermine the cogency of C-Rev against physicalism. §3 elaborates on the historical roots of C-Rev. §4 presents some of the major arguments which have been offered for A-Rev. A few concluding remarks close the paper. (shrink)

In the book "Experiential Philosophy- Body-based Wisdom and Challenges to Western Thought', Professors Lakoff and Johnson divided cognitive science into the first generation of cognitive science (based on British-American analytical philosophy and a Priori philosophy) and the second generation of cognitive science (based on experiential philosophy, emphasizing: the experiential nature of the mind, the unconscious nature of cognition, and the metaphorical nature of thinking), expounded the characteristics of the two generations of cognitive science (...) and the differences between the two, and firmly believed that cognitive linguistics is based on the second generation of cognitive science theory, which is a reaction to structuralism and generative schools, thereby clarifying cognitive linguistics. Some basic points of view. (shrink)

This is a study in thinking according to, but not withheld by, traditional methods from the branch of philosophy called Experiential Philosophy. Philosophers are interested in the topic of thought, if no one else. Yet, thinking is what we do sixteen hours a day. Or, as this study will show, thinking is what is done to us sixteen hours a day. What is thinking? Why is it? And, who is in charge here anyway? The following book will (...) enter these questions and make a serious attempt to keep deviations from target as small as possible. The thesis of this book is based on the recognition that thought is an activity in human beings that (1) proceeds in a fragmented way and that (2) basically cannot be halted. We cannot opt out of thinking. The conclusion is that this accounts for human suffering, lack of direction, and chaos in daily actions and decisions. This leads to the further conclusion that thinking is not something we do, it is something that is being done in us. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature on consciousness and the mind-body problem, the conceivability argument against physicalism is usually taken to support a form of dualism between physicality and phenomenality. Usually, the discussion focuses on the qualitative character of experience, which is what the phenomenal feel of a given experience is like. By contrast, the subjective character of experience, or its individuation to a given first-person subject, tends to be set aside. The aim of this paper is to present a new and (...) more robust version of the conceivability argument for dualism that appeals to the subjective character of experience. Drawing on insights by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, I conceptualise the first-person subjective character of experience as a transcendental condition of possibility for phenomenality that cannot be reduced to third-person facts about the physical world. Given this, the mind-body problem as it pertains to consciousness does not merely concern the inability of the set of physical facts about a brain state to capture the qualitative character of experience, but concerns the existential issue of why this brain state is accompanied by first-person subjectivity at all. This allows us to reconceive the conceivability argument in a way that presents a stronger case for dualism than the traditional version of the argument. (shrink)

Law is ‘sovereign’, it has been said. Since the poet Pindar expressed this fulminating thought in the 6th century B.C., the whole western tradition, from Aristotle to Cicero, from Heidegger to Schmitt, hasn’t stopped raising questions about the ambivalent relationship connecting law, strength and violence...

This essay examines three approaches to the concept of death: an existential approach by Heidegger, a pragmatic evaluation by Nagel, and an experiential account by Philip Gould, who was not a professional philosopher but who wrote a detailed description of the time before his death from cancer. It compares and contrasts the different approaches, and uses Gould's account as a real a life check on the two philosophical analyses.

Consciousness is targeted by both philosophers and neuroscientists; but different methodological premises and even different conceptions about what conscious experience is and how the challenges and potential problems associated with consciousness research should be formulated underlie the different approaches. Namely, whereas empirical data and the constant refinement of experimental procedures to expand and modify this body of empirical data and resulting empirical theories are crucial to neuroscience, the significance of empirical knowledge to philosophy is less clear: Although empirical data (...) certainly can influence philosophical concepts, the latter are nonetheless prerequisites of empirical research itself and thus may themselves not be empirically testable. The present paper elaborates from a multidisciplinary, neuroscientist-philosopher’s perspective the relation of philosophical concepts and empirical research on consciousness, drawing on two exemplary controversies from the philosophy of mind – on the ontological status of experiential properties and on free will. Consequences from both the scientific and the philosophical standpoint are discussed. (shrink)

This thesis is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. (...) The inferentialist proposal holds that experiential content is necessarily under¬pinned by sophisticated cognitive influences. My alternative, the continuum theory, holds that these influences are relevant to experience only at certain levels of organisation and that at other levels there are contents which such features do not capture at all. Central to my account is that there are degrees to which cognitive influences affect experiential content; indeed, for the most part, experience is an amalgam of both inferential and non-inferential features. I claim that the inferentialist proposal is fundamentally flawed and deserves replacement, and I argue that my alternative fills the hollow that remains. The thesis is divided into four sections. In Part I, Chapter 1, I introduce two traditionally rival views of experiential content. In Chapter 2, I develop my continuum alternative. Chapter 3 assesses the relationship between experience and language, while Chapter 4 explores the relationship between beliefs and experience. The overall argument is that it has been a mistake to understand experience simply in inferential or non-inferential terms. In Part II, I examine the structure of mental content. Chapter 5 is concerned with the kinds of experiences which escape the inferentialist analysis. Chapter 6 considers Kant’s metaphysic of experience counterpointed to Lorenz’s reading of his work in the light of evolutionary biology. Chapter 7 treats animal experience in relation to the continuum view I am developing, while Chapter 8 reviews Fodor’s contribution to perceptual psychology. It is argued that the view of experiential content being developed is both consistent with empirical data on informationally local perceptual sub-systems, but also accords well with evolutionary theory and a naturalist interpretation of Kant’s taxonomy. Part III deals with inferentialism in the philosophy of science. In Chapter 9, I assess the theory dependence of observation thesis as it is advanced by Paul Feyerabend. I bring out of his account a subtle confusion concerning the importance of inference in the context of scientific inquiry. Part IV deals with the issue of experience in the philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10, I look at Wilfred Sellars’s attack on sense data theories. Chapter 11 confronts Paul Churchland’s treatment of ‘folk psychology’ while Chapter 12 isolates the issue of experiential qualia and the position of property dualism. I offer a critical review of Thomas Nagel’s work in this chapter and claim that his position can be read in a way which is consistent with the continuum account I am developing. I conclude the thesis in the usual fashion with a summary of the central claims. (shrink)

In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects but for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that (...) thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons. (shrink)

BOOK REVIEW: Through fifteen interrelated essays, Daniel Campos’ Loving Immigrants in America reflects upon his experiences as a Latin American immigrant to the United States and develops an experiential philosophy of personal interaction. Building upon previous work, Campos’ implicit conceptual framework comes from Charles S. Peirce’s dual philosophical accounts of the evolution of personality and evolutionary love. But the flesh and blood of the book are Campos’ own personal experiences as an immigrant who has labored for more than (...) twenty years to make himself at home in the United States, aka la Yunai, by growing to love an impressively broad range of places and people across the country. Campos begins in rural Arkansas (where he arrived as an eighteen-year-old from Costa Rica to study at a small religious liberal arts college), travels extensively across the Deep South (in a series of road trips described in Chapters 3-6), completes an MA in Statistics and later a PhD in Philosophy at Penn State, and eventually settles to teach at Brooklyn College where he is surrounded by immigrants from all over the world. The book’s cast of characters and Campos’ interactions with them are so extensive as to defy generalization, but careful readers are likely to walk away convinced of Campos’ claim that “anyone who is receptive and attentive to the commonality of human experience can empathize with immigrants” (2). (shrink)

I argue that interesting experiences are experientially valuable in the same fashion as pleasant experiences, yet that the interesting is nonetheless a distinct value from the pleasant. Insofar as it challenges the hedonist’s assumption that pleasure and pain are the only evaluative dimensions of our phenomenological experiences, my argument here serves both as a defense of the value of the interesting and as an important critique of hedonism.

In recent literature, panpsychism has been defended by appeal to two main arguments: first, an argument from philosophy of mind, according to which panpsychism is the only view which successfully integrates consciousness into the physical world (Strawson 2006; Chalmers 2013); second, an argument from categorical properties, according to which panpsychism offers the only positive account of the categorical or intrinsic nature of physical reality (Seager 2006; Adams 2007; Alter and Nagasawa 2012). Historically, however, panpsychism has also been defended by (...) appeal to a third argument based on considerations about the nature and observability of causation. This argument has not been much discussed in recent times. Here is a concise version from William James: "… the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency … If we took these experiences as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature. In other words, we should have to espouse a so-called “pan-psychic” philosophy" (James 1911: 218). James here suggests that we have direct experience of causation in our own agency. He thereby directly contradicts David Hume, who famously denied that we have any experience of causation. James goes on to claim that if this experience is representative of causation in general, it follows that all causation is mental, and that panpsychism is true. This kind of argument for panpsychism can be called the argument from (experience of) causation. This chapter offers, first, a history of this argument and arguments closely related to it, and second, an analysis of the argument – is it valid, are its premises in any way defensible, and how does it relate to the other, more popular arguments for panpsychism from philosophy of mind and categorical properties? (shrink)

Throughout its brief history the philosophy of technology has been largely concerned with the debate over the nature of technology. Typically, technology has been viewed as being essentially another term for applied science, the practical application of scientific theory to the material world. In recent years philosophers and cultural critics have characterised technology in a far more problematic fashion, as an authoritarian power with the ability to bring about far-reaching cultural, political and ecological effects. Proponents of the former view (...) are often termed instrumentalists and those of the latter technological determinists. The debate between them revolves around the question of the fact/value distinction, namely whether technology can be deemed to be value-neutral. I argue that employing a phenomenological approach to technology grants us a fresh perspective on the instrumentalism-determinism debate. It enables us to recast the instrumentalist/determinist debate as a debate between technological idealism and materialism, and to ground the instrumentalist and determinist positions in different experiential relations to technology. It also gives us a better grasp of the function of the different critiques of technology, with idealists concerned primarily with the misapplication of technology as a form of knowledge, and materialists with the existential implications of concrete technological relations. (shrink)

Discussions of immortality in the Middles Ages tend to focus on the nature of the rational soul and its prospects for surviving the death of the body. The question of how medieval figures expected to experience everlasting life—what I will be calling the phenomenology of immortality—receives far less attention. In this paper, I explore the range of these expectations during a relatively narrow but intensely rich temporal and geographical slice of the Middle Ages (the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the (...) ‘Latin Christian West’). In section 1, I sketch the two central accounts of the rational soul and human nature (inspired by the Platonist and Aristotelian traditions) that set the metaphysical parameters for medieval discussions of our experience of the afterlife. In section 2, I address accounts that involve transcending the soul’s experiences of itself as an individual. In section 3, I turn to views that emphasize the embodied aspect of human existence and depict our unending union with God in affective and physical terms. In section 4, I argue that the views discussed in 2 and 3 form endpoints of an ‘experiential continuum of immortality’ that provides important context for scholastic accounts of immortality as well as expanding the traditional narrative of medieval philosophy. (shrink)

Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form ‘x remembers/imagines p’). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb 'remember' is surprisingly similar to that of the verb 'imagine'. This (...) holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between 'remember' and 'imagine'. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining. (shrink)

The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and (...) interplay in our cogntive architecture. Based on the philosophical discourse of philosophy of mind, four types of imagination are indentified and conceptualized: sensory, propositional, experiential, and creative imagination. These categories are then employed on five phenomena that can be found in scientific and religious environments: metaphors, models, thought experiments, aspect perception, and - in the religious case - rituals. In relation to the concept of religious "seeing" I consider how imaginings may influence visionary experiences and visualization, and compare these phenomena with cases of scientific visualization and eureka experiences. In regard to scientific and religious models, a distinction is made between, on the one hand, two notions of truth and, on the other hand, truth-independent meaning-making. In light of these categories, I differentiate between, and critically discuss, the use of imagination in doxastic, non-doxastic and fictionalist accounts. In light of this investigation, I formulate and defend the position of interactivism, which acknowledges a constant interplay between different attitudes and mental states. In my examination of rituals and scientific and religious thought experiments, special attention is given to the mental capacity to recreate the experiences that are entailed in an imagined scenario. At the end of the investigation, I consider the possible impact that my study might have on how we view science and religion as well as the dialogue bewteen these two fields. (shrink)

The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popular phenomenal intuitions regarding perspectival experiences and argue that the major theories of (...) perspectival experiences do not account for all of them. Relying on these observations, I show how a theory which accommodates all these intuitions can be developed by (a) recognising that visual perspectival experiences are, in fact, multimodal visuo-bodily experiences and (b) distinguishing between egocentric and structural contents. (shrink)

Lonergan’s treatment of transcendental method in the first chapter of <Method in Theology> presents a bit of a puzzle. Something about heightening consciousness at the level of experience is different from the reflexive operations by which we objectify this heightened experience. Lonergan’s summary statement of transcendental method makes no explicit reference to what this difference is. In this paper, I work out an interpretation of transcendental method in which I relate the problem of being explicit about heightening consciousness at the (...) level of experience to the problem of objectifying the subject-as-subject: both are a matter of performance. In this regard I identify a performative mode of subjective operation – in addition to the direct and introspective modes that Lonergan identifies in <Insight> – and develop an account of this mode of operation as it is manifested experientially in feelings and existentially in action. I relate the notion of feelings as data of consciousness to Lonergan’s account of the unity-in-tension of human consciousness, various forms and degrees of tension being the primary feeling-states of conscious experience. Finally, I note the significance of transcendental method in action with regard to understanding the subtleties of subject-to-subject communication in the encounter of patient and clinician as part of a philosophy of health on which I am working. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy of language has often criticized classical pragmatism for holding to an unwarranted notion of experience which lapses into epistemological foundationalism; defenders of the classics have denied such a consequence. The paper tries to move this debate forward by pointing out that the criticism of the empiricist “given” is not wedded to a specific philosophical method, be it linguistic or pragmatist. From a broader historical perspective drawing in particular on Kant, antifoundationalism turns out to be deeply rooted in (...) modern western philosophy and its ambivalent attitude towards the success of the empirical sciences. This diagnosis allows to reassess classical pragmatism beyond the perceived alternative “language vs. experience”, and to concentrate on antifoundationalism as the real challenge to any modern, epistemologically oriented philosophy. In that perspective, classical pragmatism’s genuine contribution is to do justice to antifoundationalism by focusing on the experimental dynamic of scientific practice, which is most commonly ignored by the analytic tradition. Pragmatism identifies rationality with the practical operation of reflexively determining and articulating what is being experienced. With this approach, it is argued, experiential pragmatism serves modern antifoundationalism ends better than its analytic siblings. (shrink)

The debate between instrumentalist and technological determinist positions on the nature of technology characterised the early history of the philosophy of technology. In recent years however technological determinism has ceased to be viewed as a credible philosophical position within the field. This paper uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to reconsider the technological determinist outlook in phenomenological terms as an experiential response to the encounter with the phenomenon of modern technology. Recasting the instrumentalist-determinist debate in a phenomenological manner enables one to (...) reconcile the apparent dualism of the instrumentalist and determinist positions through Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. This ontology has recently been used to ground accounts of virtual embodiment. We argue that in addition to explaining away the classical form of technological determinism, it can also phenomenologically ground a novel understanding of technological determinism. Namely, a technological determinism of virtual embodiment. (shrink)

This article is a profile of the journal Hypatia for TPM: its founding, its mission, and central themes that figure in its close to 30 year publication history. When the first issues of Hypatia appeared in the mid-1980s they were the culmination, in the mid-1980s, of a decade-long process of visionary debate in the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) about what form a journal of feminist philosophy should take, and extended discussion of how to make it a (...) reality. The guiding vision and a signature strength of Hypatia has always been its pluralism. The touchstone for the new generations of feminist philosophers who founded and now sustain Hypatia has been the real world, experiential and political issues that have galvanized feminist activism and scholarship since the late 1960s – directing attention to new questions as well as reframing the old. (shrink)

Faultless disagreement and faultless retraction have been taken to motivate relativism for predicates of personal taste, like ‘tasty’. Less attention has been devoted to the question of what aspect of their meaning underlies this relativist behavior. This paper illustrates these same phenomena with a new category of expressions: appearance predicates, like ‘tastes vegan’ and ‘looks blue’. Appearance predicates and predicates of personal taste both fall into the broader category of experiential predicates. Approaching predicates of personal taste from this angle (...) suggests that their relativist behavior is due to their experience-sensitivity, rather than their evaluative meaning. Furthermore, appearance predicates hold interest beyond what they can teach us about predicates of personal taste. Examination of a variety of uses of appearance predicates reveals that they give rise to relativist behavior for a variety of reasons—including some that apply also to other types of expressions, such as epistemic modals and comparative terms. This paper thus serves both to probe the source of relativist behavior in discourse about personal taste, as well as to map out this kind of behavior in the rich and under-explored discourse about appearances. (shrink)

For forty years I have argued that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes to seek and promote wisdom. How did I come to argue for such a preposterously gigantic intellectual revolution? It goes back to my childhood. From an early age, I desired passionately to understand the physical universe. Then, around adolescence, my passion became to understand the heart and soul of people via the novel. But I never discovered how (...) to tell stories in order to tell the truth. So, having failed to become a physicist, and failed to become a novelist, I studied philosophy at Manchester University and then, in six weeks of inspiration, discovered that the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires. Philosophy should be about how to live, and should not just do conceptual analysis. I struggled to reconcile the two worlds of my childhood ambitions, the physical universe and the human world. I decided they could be reconciled with one another if one regarded the two accounts of them, physics and common sense, as myths, and not as literal truths. But then I discovered Karl Popper: truth is too important to be discarded. I revised my ideas: physics seeks to depict truly only an aspect of all that there is; in addition, there is the aspect of the experiential features of the world as we experience it. I was immensely impressed with Popper’s view that science makes progress, not by verification, but by ferocious attempted falsification of theories. I was impressed, too, with his generalization of this view to form critical rationalism. Then it dawned on me: Popper’s view of science is untenable because it misrepresents the basic aim of science. This is not truth as such; rather it is explanatory truth – truth presupposed to be unified or physically comprehensible. We need, I realized, a new conception of science, called by me aim-oriented empiricism, which acknowledges the real, problematic aims of science, and seeks to improve them. Then, treading along a path parallel to Popper’s, I realized that aim-oriented empiricism can be generalized to form a new conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, with implications for all that we do. This led on to a new conception of academic inquiry. From the Enlightenment we have inherited the view that academia, in order to help promote human welfare, must first acquire knowledge. But this is profoundly and damagingly irrational. If academia really does seek to help promote human welfare, then its primary tasks must be to articulate problems of living, and propose and critically assess possible solutions – possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary. Academia needs to promote cooperatively rational problem solving in the social world, and needs to help humanity improve individual and institutional aims by exploiting aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the real progress-achieving methods of science. We might, as a result, get into life some of the progressive success that is such a marked feature of science. Thus began my campaign to promote awareness of the urgent need for a new kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity create a wiser world. (shrink)

This book is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. (...) The inferentialist proposal holds that experiential content is necessarily under¬pinned by sophisticated cognitive influences. My alternative, the continuum theory, holds that these influences are relevant to experience only at certain levels of organisation and that at other levels there are contents which such features do not capture at all. Central to my account is that there are degrees to which cognitive influences affect experiential content; indeed, for the most part, experience is an amalgam of both inferential and non-inferential features. I claim that the inferentialist proposal is fundamentally flawed and deserves replacement, and I argue that my alternative fills the hollow that remains. The book is divided into four sections. In Part I, Chapter 1, I introduce two traditionally rival views of experiential content. In Chapter 2, I develop my continuum alternative. Chapter 3 assesses the relationship between experience and language, while Chapter 4 explores the relationship between beliefs and experience. The overall argument is that it has been a mistake to understand experience simply in inferential or non-inferential terms. In Part II, I examine the structure of mental content. Chapter 5 is concerned with the kinds of experiences which escape the inferentialist analysis. Chapter 6 considers Kant’s metaphysic of experience counterpointed to Lorenz’s reading of his work in the light of evolutionary biology. Chapter 7 treats animal experience in relation to the continuum view I am developing, while Chapter 8 reviews Fodor’s contribution to perceptual psychology. It is argued that the view of experiential content being developed is both consistent with empirical data on informationally local perceptual sub-systems, but also accords well with evolutionary theory and a naturalist interpretation of Kant’s taxonomy. Part III deals with inferentialism in the philosophy of science. In Chapter 9, I assess the theory dependence of observation thesis as it is advanced by Paul Feyerabend. I bring out of his account a subtle confusion concerning the importance of inference in the context of scientific inquiry. Part IV deals with the issue of experience in the philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10, I look at Wilfred Sellars’s attack on sense data theories. Chapter 11 confronts Paul Churchland’s treatment of ‘folk psychology’ while Chapter 12 isolates the issue of experiential qualia and the position of property dualism. I offer a critical review of Thomas Nagel’s work in this chapter and claim that his position can be read in a way which is consistent with the continuum account I am developing. I conclude the book in the usual fashion with a summary of the central claims. (shrink)

In the philosophy of mind, the study of mental life has tended to focus on three central aspects of mental states: their representational content, their functional role, and their phenomenal character. The representational content of a mental state is what the state represents, what it is about; its functional role is the role it plays within the functional organization of the subject’s overall psychology; its phenomenal character is the experiential or subjective quality that goes with what it is (...) like, from the inside, to be in it. The study of this third aspect of mental life is known as phenomenology. Thus, moral phenomenology is the study of the experiential dimension of our moral inner life – of the phenomenal character of moral mental states. (shrink)

Illusionism is the view that conscious experience is some sort of introspective illusion. According to illusionism, there is no conscious experience, but it merely seems like there is conscious experience. This would suggest that much phenomenological enquiry, including work on phenomenological psychopathology, rests on a mistake. Some philosophers have argued that illusionism is obviously false, because seeming is itself an experiential state, and so necessarily presupposes the reality of conscious experience. In response, the illusionist could suggest that the relevant (...) sort of seeming here is not an experiential state, but is a cognitive state, such as a judgement or a belief, which is fully amenable to a physical or functionalist analysis. Herein, I argue that this response is unsuccessful and fails to undermine the reality of conscious experience. Nonetheless, the response does raise the problem of how a judgement or belief about the character of a conscious experience, even if it is true, can be justified if the conscious experience has no causal role in the formation of the judgement or belief. This is not a new problem, but is a reiteration of an old problem that is known in the philosophy of mind literature as the paradox of phenomenal judgement. I consider how the paradox of phenomenal judgement can be resolved and how the judgement or belief about conscious experience can be justified with appeal to the notion of acquaintance. (shrink)