•  201
    "Soul Dust: the Magic of Consciousness" by Nicholas Humphrey (review)
    The Times Literary Supplement 1. 2011.
    Nicholas Humphrey thinks that consciousness is a kind of illusion. He claims that when we have conscious sensory experiences, it seems to us that we are aware of certain “phenomenal” properties like colours, smells, sounds, when in reality there are no such things. In fact, there cannot be any such things, since phenomenal properties are impossible. Something in our brains causes us to have experiences which represent “extraordinary otherworldly properties”. The whole of conscious experience see…Read more
  •  201
    The Vienna Circle was a group of scientifically-minded philosophers, many physicists by training, who in the 1920s and 30s developed the cluster of philosophical doctrines known as Logical Positivism. Among the Circle’s most distinguished members were Rudolf Carnap and Herbert Feigl, each of whom emigrated to America during the Nazi era. It is said that Feigl, the author of an important 1958 monograph defending a materialist approach to the mind-body problem, once gave a visiting lecture on the …Read more
  •  289
    There is no Question of Physicalism
    In Paul K. Moser & J. D. Trout (eds.), Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, Routledge. pp. 65. 1995.
    Many philosophers are impressed by the progress achieved by physical sciences. This has had an especially deep effect on their ontological views: it has made many of them physicalists. Physicalists believe that everything is physical: more precisely, that all entities, properties, relations and facts are those which are studied by physics or other physical sciences...
  •  1822
    Franz Brentano’s attempt to distinguish mental from physical phenomena by employing the scholastic concept of intentional inexistence is often cited as reintroducing the concept of intentionality into mainstream philosophical discussion. But Brentano’s own claims about intentional inexistence are much misunderstood. In the second half of the 20th century, analytical philosophers in particular have misread Brentano’s views in misleading ways.1 It is important to correct these misunderstandings if…Read more
  •  555
    Mental Substances
    In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 229-250. 2003.
    Philosophers of mind typically conduct their discussions in terms of mental events, mental processes, mental properties, mental states – but rarely in terms of minds themselves. Sometimes this neglect is explicitly acknowledged. Donald Davidson, for example, writes that ‘there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events’.2 Hilary…Read more
  •  287
    The best definition of philosophy, in my opinion, was given by Wilfrid Sellars fifty years ago: ‘The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. This definition does not get us very far; and nor should we expect it to (after all, as Nietzsche said, only that which has no history can be defined). But it does give us something to get started on. One important element in t…Read more
  •  1405
    The Waterfall Illusion
    Analysis 48 (June): 142-47. 1988.
    If you stare for a period of time at a scene which contains movement in one direction, and then turn your attention to an object in a scene which contains no movement, this object will appear to move in the opposite direction to that of the original movement. The effect can be easily achieved by attaching a piece of paper with a spiral drawn on it to the spinning turntable of a record player, and then turning the turntable off while continuing to look at the spiral (see Frisby 1979, pp. 100-101 …Read more
  •  263
    Reply to Pettit
    Analysis 53 (4): 224-27. 1993.
    In an earlier paper [3], D. H. Mellor and I argued that physicalism faces a dilemma: 'physical' is either taken in very restrictive sense, in which case physicalism is clearly false; or it is taken in a very broad sense, in which case the doctrine is almost empty. The challenge to the physicalist is to define a doctrine which is both defensible and substantial. Philip Pettit [4] accepts this challenge, and responds with a definition of physicalism which he thinks avoids the dilemma. Pettit's def…Read more
  •  816
    Intentional Objects
    Ratio 14 (4): 298-317. 2001.
    Is there, or should there be, any place in contemporary philosophy of mind for the concept of an intentional object? Many philosophers would make short work of this question. In a discussion of what intentional objects are supposed to be, John Searle...
  •  313
    In Defence of Psychologism
    In Aspects of Psychologism, Harvard University Press. 2014.
    The term ‘psychologism’ is normally used for the doctrine that logical and mathematical truths must be explained in terms of psychological truths (see Kusch 1995 and 2011). As such, the term is typically pejorative: the widespread consensus is that psychologism in this sense is a paradigm of philosophical error, a gross mistake that was identified and conclusively refuted by Frege and Husserl.
  •  1605
    The Nonconceptual Content of Experience
    In The Contents of Experience, Cambridge University Press. pp. 136-57. 1992.
    Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. The claim is not, of course, that the child’s experie…Read more
  •  1276
    The Mind-Body Problem
    In Rob Wilson & Frank Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, Mit Press. 1999.
    The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how our mental states, events and processes—like beliefs, actions and thinking—are related to the physical states, events and processes in our bodies. A question of the form, ‘how is A related to B?’ does not by itself pose a philosophical problem. To pose such a problem, there has to be something about A and B which makes the relation between them seem problematic. Many features of mind and body have been cited as responsible for our sense of t…Read more
  •  343
    History of the Mind-Body Problem (edited book)
    Routledge. 2000.
    This collection of new essays put the debates on the mind-body problem into historical context.
  •  8832
    I’d like to begin, if I may, by repeating myself. When I spoke at the Institute’s official launch last June, I quoted W.V. Quine’s remark that logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one; and I commented that whatever the truth of this, it is undeniably true that philosophy is an old subject and has been a great one since the 5th century BC. The foundation of an institute of philosophy in the University of London has been, in my opinion, a great thing for philosophy and for t…Read more
  •  419
    "The Nature of Consciousness" edited by Ned Block, Owen Flanagan and Güven Güzeldere (review)
    The Times Higher Education Supplement 1. 1999.
    Theories of the mind have been celebrating their new-found freedom to study consciousness. Earlier this century, when the methodology of psychology was still under the influence of behaviourism—the view that psychology can only study observable behaviour—the ‘superstition and magic’ of consciousness (in John Watson’s words) was not the proper object of scientific investigation. But now, there are respectable journals devoted to the study of consciousness, there are international interdisciplinar…Read more
  •  291
    "Physicalism: the Philosophical Foundations" by Jeffrey Poland (review)
    The Times Literary Supplement 4831. 1995.
    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…Read more
  •  2574
    What Is the Problem of Perception?
    Synthesis Philosophica 20 (2): 237-264. 2005.
    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 …Read more
  •  539
    Concepts in Perception
    Analysis 48 (3): 150-153. 1988.
    I can agree with much of what D.H. Mellor says in his response to my paper ('Crane's Waterfall Illusion'). I can agree that perception in some sense 'aims' at truth, that its function 'is to tell us how the world truly is'...
  •  17
    Philosophie, Logik, Naturwissenschaft, Geschichte
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 61 (1): 3-19. 2013.
    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 philos…Read more
  •  786
    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 …Read more
  •  187
    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 c…Read more
  •  963
    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…Read more
  •  120
    "What Minds Can Do" by Pierre Jacob (review)
    Acta Analytica 1 (26). 1999.
    Among the many things minds can do, two general kinds of thing have inspired much of the debate in recent philosophy of mind. The first is minds’ power to represent the world, their intentionality. The second is their power to generate action. The first power has seemed problematic to physicalist or naturalist philosophers, since it is hard to understand how a mere physical object—which is what a mind is—can ‘direct’ itself on things in the way characteristic of intentionality. The second power …Read more
  •  444
    Introduction
    with Brian P. McLaughlin
    Synthese 170 (2): 211-15. 2009.
    Jerry Fodor, by common agreement, is one of the world’s leading philosophers. At the forefront of the cognitive revolution since the 1960s, his work has determined much of the research agenda in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology for well over 40 years. This special issue dedicated to his work is intended both as a tribute to Fodor and as a contribution to the fruitful debates that his work has generated. One philosophical thesis that has dominated Fodor’s work since the 196…Read more
  •  1557
    The Origins of Qualia
    In Tim Crane & Sarah Patterson (eds.), The History of the Mind-Body Problem, Routledge. 2000.
    The mind-body problem in contemporary philosophy has two parts: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. These two parts are not unrelated; in fact, it can be helpful to see them as two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the causal interaction between mental and physical phenomena seems to require that all causally efficacious mental phenomena are physical; but on the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness seems to entail that not all mental phenomena are physical…Read more
  •  190
    What is the relevance of the history of philosophy to philosophy as such? This is not the question, what is the reason for studying the history of philosophy? This question is easy to answer. Philosophy is part of our culture, and the history of our culture is worth studying, if anything is. Nor is it the question, should academic institutions teach the history of philosophy as part of a philosophical education? It is widely accepted that students should be taught the history of philosophy, even…Read more
  •  62
    A German translation of six essays (‘The Non-Conceptual Content of Experience’, ‘The Mental Causation Debate’, ‘Mental Substances’, ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental’, ‘Subjective Knowledge’, ‘The Intentional Structure of Consciousness’) with a new introduction, ‘The Mental and the Physical’