Tim Crane

The Reverend Anthony Freeman gained a brief moment of fame last year when he lost his parish because his bishop took him to be an unbeliever. The British national newspapers enjoyed the spectacle of an ‘atheist vicar’ for a while; however, Mr Freeman himself always denied that he was an atheist. One paper reported an interview with his local parish magazine, where Mr Freeman was asked directly whether he believed in God. Mr Freeman replied that of course he did, but that working out exactly what it means to believe in God was his life’s work. It may not unreasonable to ask how one can be so confident in believing something when one does not know exactly what it is.

What is the distinctively philosophical problem of perception? Here it is argued that it is the conflict between the nature of perceptual experience as it intuitively seems to us, and certain possibilities which are implicit in the very idea of experience: possibilities of illusion and to the world' which involves direct awareness of existing objects and their properties. But if one can have an experience of the same kind without the object being there -- a hallucination of an object -- then it seems that perceptual experience cannot essentially be such a relation. This is the fundamentally philosophical problem of perception; the various philosophical theories of perception in the 20th and 21st centuries can be seen as responses to it.

Analytic philosophy is sometimes said to have particularly close connections to logic and to science, and no particularly interesting or close relation to its own history. It is argued here that although the connections to logic and science have been important in the development of analytic philosophy, these connections do not come close to characterizing the nature of analytic philosophy, either as a body of doctrines or as a philosophical method. We will do better to understand analytic philosophy – and its relationship to continental philosophy – if we see it as a historically constructed collection of texts, which define its key problems and concerns. It is true, however, that analytic philosophy has paid little attention to the history of the subject. This is both its strength – since it allows for a distinctive kind of creativity – and its weakness – since ignoring history can encourage a philosophical variety of “normal science.”

As Jaegwon Kim points out in his excellent new book, “reductionism” has become something of a pejorative term in philosophy and related disciplines. But originally (eg, as expressed in Ernest Nagel’s 1961 The Structure of Science) reduction was supposed to be a form of explanation, and one may wonder whether it is reasonable to reject in principle the advances in knowledge which such explanations may offer. Nagel’s own view, illustrated famously by the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, was that reduction is a relation between theories: theory A is reduced to theory B by formulating “bridge laws” which link the terminology of the theories, and using them to derive A from B. (An additional reductive claim is that Aphenomena are identical with certain B-phenomena—as when the temperature of a gas is identified with its mean molecular kinetic energy—but this kind of identity claim is, strictly speaking, independent of the claim about theories.) Applied to the case of mental states and brain states, a reduction would provide explanatory relations between psychology and neuroscience, normally supplemented with the claim that mental properties are identical with physical properties in the brain.

The concept of intentionality — what Brentano called ‘the mind’s direction on its obj ects’ — has been a preoccupation of many of the most significant twentieth century philosophers. The purpose of this essay is to examine the place of the concept of intentionality in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and to criticize one aspect of his treatment of intentionality. Although the word ‘intentionality’ is not (to my knowledge) used in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings, the idea it expresses was central at all stages of his philosophical development. This should be obvious on a little reflection, not least because the philosophical notion of intentionality is closely related to the notion of meaning, and questions about meaning are, of course, central to both the T ractatus and Wittgenstein’s later work.‘ A full treatment of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning is not a task for a single essay. Instead, what I want to do here is to narrow the focus and discuss some specific claims in Wittgenstein’s middle and later work about the role of the notion of grammar in his attempts to solve (or dissolve) some quite specific problems of intentionality. In particular, I want to restrict myself to the discussion his later remarks about the relationship between expectation and fulfillment, and the..

In this paper, it is argued that the late twentieth century conception of consciousness in analytic philosophy emerged from the idea of consciousness as givenness, via the behaviourist idea of “raw feels”. In the post-behaviourist period in philosophy, this resulted in the division of states of mind into essentially unconscious propositional attitudes plus the phenomenal residue of qualia: intrinsic, ineffable and inefficacious sensory states. It is striking how little in the important questions about consciousness depends on this conception, or on this particular division of mental states. So accepting this division and its associated conceptions of intentionality and consciousness is not an obligatory starting point for the philosophy of mind. A historical investigation of how these ideas came to be seen as inevitable can also help us see how we might reasonably reject them.