Back from the beach at last! We’ve just read Sydney Shoemaker’s “On the Way Things Appear” in the 2006 Gendler/Hawthorne collection [Perceptual Experience, OUP]. Here, I’m interested in a very small point about the ontology of appearance properties (nothing to say about Shoemaker’s nice response to Michael Thau).
[Warning: This post was intended to be simple […]
After a summer hiatus, the philosophy of mind reading group here at SMU has re-formed, and hopefully with it the blog will receive more frequent updates. Last week we read an interesting paper by Andy Egan, entitled “Secondary Qualities and Self-Location” (PPR Jan. 2006). [Available online here. This paper applies Egan’s very useful notion of a “centering feature” to the task of giving an account of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. In my post I want to say a few general things about the desiderata Egan identifies for a satisfying way of drawing that distinction. I will then turn to the specifics of Egan’s account of secondary qualities in terms of centering features. [….]
THE ISSUE
In many respects, Dry Earth seems to its residents much the way that Earth seems to us. They speak like we do. They undergo experiences indistinguishable from our own. That’s why they have a word ‘water’ that they use thinking that it picks out a clear, potable liquid that fills what […]
In a thought provoking talk at the SSPP last weekend, Colin McGinn made a brief argument against “qualia” views of consciousness which hold that consciousness is an intrinsic property of the subject.Put simply, conscious necessarily has a relational structure, involving a subject and an object, so it cannot be a matter of a subject having an intrinsic property. This argument appears pretty straightforward and conclusive, but I have my doubts…
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We are very happy to announce a new group, the ‘Society for the
Metaphysics of Science’, (unsurprisingly) devoted to the ‘metaphysics
of science’.
We would like to invite anyone interested to join the group, we welcome
new members!, and also to attend our upcoming sessions at the Pacific
and Central APA Conferences. The website for the Society can be found
here:
http://www.centenary.edu/philosophy/aizawa/Society-for-the-Metaphysics-of-Science
The […]
What is the relevance of the existence of qualia for theories of perception? In his contribution to the Gendler and Hawthorne (eds.) Perceptual Experience , Tim Crane (”Is There a Perceptual Relation?”) answers: little to none. This is (I think) a surprising view, and one I disagree with. I’ll start with how I would answer the question before turning to Crane’s reasons for thinking the “question of qualia is not an important question” for the philosophy of perception.
[….]
Last semester I attended two conferences: the Physicalism and Beyond workshop at the Berlin GAP.6 conference, in September, and the Alabama Philosophical Society’s 2006 meeting, here at The University of Alabama, in October. A social highlight of the Berlin conference was finally meeting Sven Walter, with whom I co-edited Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal […]
A comment of Kati Farkas’ was too interesting not to comment on, but commenting on it in the thread on Philippe’s post would have been off topic. New post, new(ish) topic, problem solved. I’m particularly interested in this remark, which captures an intuitive motivation often offered on behalf of internalism:
Philippe, you ask for […]
Help wanted! Over the break, I’ve been forced to think about Content-Externalism, something I hadn’t done for quite a while. My old rebellious self used to find Internalism appealing, but now, I’m not so sure I even understand what’s going on in this dispute: in particular, I don’t see how anyone would want to defend […]
In a previous post I questioned whether or not Categorical Phenomenalism—the view that phenomenal properties are the categorical bases of the dispositional properties studied by the physical sciences—is an “according to Hoyle” physicalist position. In this post I want to raise a related worry: that Categorical Phenomenalism in the end is committed to epiphenomenalism.