In his recent book, Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker offers a novel resolution to the Sleeping Beauty problem (pp. 59-64). This resolution depends heavily upon Stalnaker’s view of possible worlds as being somewhat more numerous than many (especially in a Lewisian tradition) have thought (Chapter 3). Other contributors will likely [...]
The Brainpains group has started reading Robert Stalnaker’s new book “Our Knowledge of the Internal World” recently released by OUP. We will have read chapters 1-4 by the middle of next week, and hope to have a post up soon after that. Stalnaker is one of those philosophers you can’t help but learn from, so [...]
This week’s Brain Pains reading was Alex Byrne’s paper, “Introspection” (Philosophical Topics 33 (2005)). Much of Byrne’s paper concerns the “inner sense” model of self-knowledge. According to the “inner sense” model, I have knowledge of my own mental states by means of “some sort of mechanism (perhaps more than one) for detecting my own mental [...]
Hi all,
Since the Scwitzgebel piece generated such lively discussion, we’re going to stay on topic reading Alex Byrne’s “Introspection” next week. Those who like to play at home are invited to join us!
Best
RH
We’ve just read Eric Schwitzgebel’s interesting “The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection”, recently published in Phil. Review. In general, I seem to find myself sympathetic to the sort of worry he’s trying to raise. In the philosophy of perception, in particular, one often hears claims about the so-called ‘naïve’ conception of experience (or about the metaphysics [...]
After an unfortunately long hiatus, with some of us preparing for tenure review, Brainpains is back with more brains and more pains. SMU has added two new philosophers of mind to our tenure-track ranks: Justin Fisher, previously a student at Arizona and a postdoc at UBC, and Matthew Lockard, fresh out of the excellent program [...]