Rebecca Copenhaver

I present a generic version of intentionalism to show that intentionalism is motivated by and consistent with direct realism. I also present a theoretically neutral account of acquaintance as direct awareness. I apply intentionalism and an acquaintance view of memory to two questions. First, do dreams acquaint us with the objects, properties, persons, and events they represent? I argue that they don’t. When dreams represent events from your past, they don’t acquaint you with events, even if the events happened. Second, do memory experiences of dreams of events that really happened acquaint us with those events? I argue that they don’t. The memory experience of an event that you dreamed about can’t renew acquaintance, even if the event happened, because dreams don’t acquaint us with events. When you have a memory experience of having dreamed of an event that happened, it is a memory experience, but not a memory: it is a veridical confabulation.

Where is my mind?: locating the mind metaphysically in Hobbes / Amy M. Schmitter -- The Cambridge Platonists: material and immaterial substance / Jasper Reid -- Descartes' philosophy of mind and its early critics / Antonia LoLordo -- Consciousness and reflection: the later Cartesians / Steven Nadler -- Malebranche on mind / Julie Walsh -- Cavendish and Conway on the individual human mind / Karen Detlefsen -- Locke and metaphysics of "state of sensibility" / Vili Lähteenmäki -- Spinoza on thinking substance and the non-substantial mind / Beth Lord -- Two theories of mind as an immaterial substance: Descartes and Leibniz / Martha Brandt Bolton -- Leibniz on perception, sensation, apperception, and conscientia / Christian Barth -- Leibniz on appetitions and desires / Julia Jorati -- The Clarke Collins correspondence / William Uzgalis -- Mental substance and mental activity / Margaret Atherton -- Thomas Reid's common sense philosophy of mind / Todd Buras -- Persons and passions in Hume's philosophy of mind / Angela Coventry -- Kant on the mind / Andrew Brook.

Thomas Reid draws a distinction between the social and solitary operations of mind—acts of mind that require other intelligent beings versus those that may performed on one’s own. Yet his distinction obscures the irreducibly social character of the solitary operations. This paper preserves Reid’s distinction while accommodating the social character of the solitary operations. According to Reid, the solitary operations presuppose the social operations, expressed in what he calls the ‘natural language’ of mankind—a language that communicates the intentions that give rise to the agreements by which the conventions of artificial languages are developed. Using artificial languages, we begin to sort the world into kinds and to anticipate the regular events that make a practical difference in our lives, providing the general conceptions that give our trains of thought the order and regularity required to form the solitary operations. By using artificial languages, we adapt social operations to solitary ends, to think alone and in silence.

Philosophers from the modern age and current philosophers share some common concerns. One is whether the ordinary objects of human perception—the objects humans see, hear, feel, taste, and smell—exist independently of our perception of them in a shared, stable, spatially-localized environment that also exists independently of perception. Another is whether a particular range of properties—colors, flavors, odors, sounds, feels—are properties of the ordinary objects of human perception, relations whose relata are properties of ordinary objects and types of typical human experiences, or properties of, or identical with, types of typical human experiences.Because both modern and current philosophers have...

For Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant, the problem of perceptual objectivity is not whether we're getting it right about the world, but whether we're getting at a world about which we can be right. This dissertation is an examination of one aspect of Reid and Kant's philosophy of mind: their theories of perception. Reid and Kant were less concerned about the truth, accuracy or justification of any particular perceptual states than they were with examining the conditions required for forming intentional, representational mental states at all. I argue that their shared concern with the conditions of the ability to represent objects at all leads them to similar answers to the problems posed by the theory of ideas, answers that are best seen in the light of Reid and Kant's anti-sensationalism and direct realism ;I argue that Reid and Kant are both non-naive direct realists. Their non-naIve direct realism is based on their anti-sensationalism. Anti-sensationalism is the position that the qualitative character of sensations alone, by itself, cannot account for the representational content of perception. Reid and Kant's direct realism is not naive because they do not deny that perception is mediated; they deny instead that perception is mediated by a representational relation internal to sensations and objects, a relation based on the intrinsic features of the relata.

It is commonly said of modern philosophy that it introduced a representative theory of perception, a theory that places representative mental items between perceivers and ordinary physical objects. Such a theory, it has been thought, would be a form of indirect realism: we perceive objects only by means of apprehending mental entities that represent them. The moral of the story is that what began with Descartes’s revolution of basing objective truth on subjective certainty ends with Hume’s paroxysms of ambivalence and skepticism in the conclusion of the first book of the..