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. [....]