•  664
    Investigates the roles of temporal concepts and self-consciousness in the development of episodic memory. According to some theorists, types of long-term memory differ primarily in the degree to which they involve or are associated with self-consciousness (although there may be no substantial differences in the kind of event information that they deliver). However, a known difficulty with this view is that it is not obvious what motivates introducing self-consciousness as the decisive factor in …Read more
  •  631
    Time and the domain of consciousness
    Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1326 90-96. 2014.
    It is often thought that there is little that seems more obvious from experience than that time objectively passes, and that time is, in this respect, quite unlike space. Yet nothing in the physical picture of the world seems to correspond to the idea of such an objective passage of time. In this paper, I discuss some attempts to explain this apparent conflict between appearance and reality. I argue that existing attempts to explain the conflict as the result of a perceptual illusion fail, and t…Read more
  •  77
    In this chapter, I discuss some ways in which debates about temporal experience intersect with wider debates about the nature of perception in general. In particular, I suggest that bearing in mind some general questions about the nature of perception can help with demarcating different theoretical approaches to temporal experience. Much of the current debate about temporal experience in philosophy is framed in terms of a debate between three specific main positions sometimes referred to as the …Read more
  •  112
    On the view that we cannot perceive movement and change: Lessons from Locke and Reid
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (3-4): 88-102. 2017.
    According to the snapshot view of temporal experience, instances of movement and change cannot, strictly speaking, be objects of sensory perception. Perceptual consciousness instead consists of a succession of individual momentary experiences, none of which is itself an experience of movement or change. The snapshot view is often presented as an intuitively appealing view of the nature of temporal experience, even by philosophers who ultimately reject it. Yet, it is puzzling how this can be so, …Read more
  •  881
    Introduction: Understanding, explaining, and intersubjectivity in schizophrenia
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8 (2-3): 83-88. 2001.
    This article provides an introduction to a special issue of the journal Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, On Understanding and Explaining Schizophrenia. The article identifies a common thread running through the different contributions to this special issue, inspired by Jaspers's (1963) suggestion that a profound impairment in the ability to engage in interpersonal and social relations is a key factor in psychiatric disorders. It is argued that this suggestion can help solve a central dilem…Read more
  •  360
    Young children's reasoning about the order of past events
    Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 98 (3): 168-183. 2007.
    Four studies are reported that employed an object location task to assess temporal–causal reasoning. In Experiments 1–3, successfully locating the object required a retrospective consideration of the order in which two events had occurred. In Experiment 1, 5- but not 4-year-olds were successful; 4-year-olds also failed to perform at above-chance levels in modified versions of the task in Experiments 2 and 3. However, in Experiment 4, 3-year-olds were successful when they were able to see the obj…Read more
  •  286
    Time and tense in perceptual experience
    Philosophers' Imprint 9 1-18. 2009.
    We can not just see, hear or feel how things are at a time, but we also have perceptual experiences as of things moving or changing. I argue that such temporal experiences have a content that is tenseless, i.e. best characterized in terms of notions such as 'before' and 'after' (rather than, say, 'past', 'present' and 'future'), and that such experiences are essentially of the nature of a process that takes up time, viz., the same time as the process that is being experienced. Both claims have b…Read more
  •  223
    Reply to Jean Decety: Perceiving actions and understanding agency
    In Jérôme Dokic & Joëlle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. pp. 45--73. 2002.
    Decety presents evidence for the claim that neural mechanisms involved in the generation of actions are also recruited in the observation and mental simulation of actions. This paper explores the relationship between such neuropsychological findings and our common-sense understanding of what it is for a person to imitate or imagine performing an action they have observed. A central question is whether imitation and imagination necessarily involve the ability to distinguish between one's own acti…Read more
  •  615
    Memory, amnesia, and the past
    Mind and Language 14 (2): 227-51. 1999.
    This paper defends the claim that, in order to have a concept of time, subjects must have memories of particular events they once witnessed. Some patients with severe amnesia arguably still have a concept of time. Two possible explanations of their grasp of this concept are discussed. They take as their respective starting points abilities preserved in the patients in question: (1) the ability to retain factual information over time despite being unable to recall the past event or situation that…Read more
  •  1047
    According to recent social interactionist accounts in developmental psychology, a child's learning to talk about the past with others plays a key role in memory development. Most accounts of this kind are centered on the theoretical notion of autobiographical memory and assume that socio-communicative interaction with others is important, in particular, in explaining the emergence of memories that have a particular type of connection to the self. Most of these accounts also construe autobiograph…Read more
  •  869
    Writing on the page of consciousness
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (3pt3): 187-209. 2015.
    I identify one particular strand of thought in Thomas Nagel's ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, which I think has helped shape a certain conception of perceptual consciousness that is still prevalent in the literature. On this conception, perceptual consciousness is to be explained in terms of a special class of properties perceptual experiences themselves exhibit. I also argue that this conception is in fact in conflict with one of the key ideas that supposedly animates Nagel's argument in ‘What …Read more
  •  706
    The perception of time and the notion of a point of view
    European Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 156-171. 1997.
    This paper aims to investigate the temporal content of perceptual experience. It argues that we must recognize the existence of temporal perceptions, i.e., perceptions the content of which cannot be spelled out simply by looking at what is the case at an isolated instant. Acts of apprehension can cover a succession of events. However, a subject who has such perceptions can fall short of having a concept of time. Similar arguments have been put forward to show that a subject who has spatial perce…Read more
  •  539
    Causal reasoning
    Philosophical Studies 152 (2): 167-179. 2011.
    The main focus of this paper is the question as to what it is for an individual to think of her environment in terms of a concept of causation, or causal concepts, in contrast to some more primitive ways in which an individual might pick out or register what are in fact causal phenomena. I show how versions of this question arise in the context of two strands of work on causation, represented by Elizabeth Anscombe and Christopher Hitchcock, respectively. I then describe a central type of reasoni…Read more
  •  337
    Perspectives on time and memory: an introduction
    In Christoph Hoerl & Teresa McCormack (eds.), Time and memory: issues in philosophy and psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-33. 2001.
    What is the connection between the way we represent time and things in time, on the one hand, and our capacity to remember particular past events, on the other? This is the substantive question that has stood behind the project of putting together this volume. The methodological assumption that has informed this project is that any progress with the difficult and fascinating set of issues that are raised by this question must draw on the resources of various areas both in philos- ophy and in psy…Read more
  •  1628
    Jaspers on explaining and understanding in psychiatry
    In Thomas Fuchs & Giovanni Stanghellini (eds.), One Hundred Years of Karl Jaspers' General Psychopathology, Oxford University Press. pp. 107-120. 2013.
    This chapter offers an interpretation of Jaspers’ distinction between explaining and understanding, which relates this distinction to that between general and singular causal claims. Put briefly, I suggest that when Jaspers talks about (mere) explanation, what he has in mind are general causal claims linking types of events. Understanding, by contrast, is concerned with singular causation in the psychological domain. Furthermore, I also suggest that Jaspers thinks that only understanding makes m…Read more