-
14The Macro and the Micro: Andreas Gursky's AestheticsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (1): 91-100. 2012.
-
518Action‐oriented PerceptionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 20 (3): 430-446. 2012.Abstract:When I throw a ball at you, do you see it as catch‐able? Do we perceive objects as edible, climbable or Q‐able in general? One could argue that it is just a manner of speaking to say so: we do not reallyseean object as edible, we only infer on the basis of its other properties that it is. I argue that whether or not an object is edible or climbable is indeed represented perceptually: weseeobjects as edible, and do not just believe that they are. My argument proceeds in two steps. First,…Read more
-
31Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception (edited book)Routledge. 2016.Philosophy of perception is one of the most robust and flourishing fields within contemporary philosophy. This volume casts a spotlight on the subject’s most dynamic conversations, with pairs of philosophers debating six key questions: 1. Are perceptual states representations? 2. How can perception be unconscious? 3. Is attention necessary for perception? 4. In what sense is perception multimodal? 5. How is vision different from other sense modalities? 6. Does perception include both low-level a…Read more
-
1Foundationalism Strikes Back? In Search of Epistemically BasicIn René van Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge: Papers in Epistemology, Ontos-verlag. pp. 41. 2005.
-
1Neither scientists, nor moralists: We are counterfactually reasoning animalsBehavioral and Brain Sciences. 2010.We are neither scientists nor moralists. Our mental capacities (like attributing intentionality) are neither akin to the scientist’s exact reasoning, nor are they “suffused through and through with moral considerations”. They are more similar to all those simple capacities that humans and animals are equally capable of, but with enhanced sensitivity to counterfactual situations: of what could have been.
-
31The structure and significance of evolutionary explanations in philosophyIn Havi Carel & David Gamez (eds.), What Philosophy is, Ccontinuum. 2004.The so-called evolutionary approach is getting more and more popular in various branches of philosophy. Evolutionary explanations are often used in virtually every classical philosophical discipline. The structure of evolutionary explanations is examined and it is pointed out that only one sub-category of evolutionary explanations, namely, nonreductive, non-stipulated adaptation-explanation can be of any philosophical significance. I finish by examining which of the proposed philosophical argume…Read more
-
765A Modal Theory of FunctionJournal of Philosophy 107 (8): 412-431. 2010.The function of a trait token is usually defined in terms of some properties of other (past, present, future) tokens of the same trait type. I argue that this strategy is problematic, as trait types are (at least partly) individuated by their functional properties, which would lead to circularity. In order to avoid this problem, I suggest a way to define the function of a trait token in terms of the properties of the very same trait token. To able to allow for the possibility of malfunctioning, …Read more
-
36
-
519Trompe l’oeil and the Dorsal/Ventral Account of Picture PerceptionReview of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (1): 181-197. 2015.While there has been a lot of discussion of picture perception both in perceptual psychology and in philosophy, these discussions are driven by very different background assumptions. Nonetheless, it would be mutually beneficial to arrive at an understanding of picture perception that is informed by both the philosophers’ and the psychologists’ story. The aim of this paper is exactly this: to give an account of picture perception that is valid both as a philosophical and as a psychological accoun…Read more
-
110Anti-pornographyIn Hans Maes & Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Art and Pornography, Oxford University Press. 2012.One striking feature of pornographic images is that they emphasize what is depicted and underplay the way it is depicted: the experience of pornography rarely involves awareness of the picture’s composition or of visual rhyme. There are various ways of making this distinction between what is depicted in a picture and the way the depicted object is depicted in it. Following Richard Wollheim, I call these two aspects, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of pictorial representation ‘recognitional’ and ‘configurat…Read more
-
68How speckled is the hen?Analysis 69 (3): 499-502. 2009.We can see a number of entities without seeing a determinate number of entities. For example, when we see the speckled hen, we do not see it as having a determinate number of speckles, although we do see it as having a lot of speckles. How is this possible? I suggest a contextualist answer that differs both from Michael Tye's and from Fred Dretske's
-
102Singularist SemirealismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2): 371-394. 2013.This paper proposes to carve out a new position in the scientific realism/antirealism debate and argue that it captures some of the most important realist and some of the most important antirealist considerations. The view, briefly stated, is that there is always a fact of the matter about whether the singular statements science gives us are literally true, but there is no fact of the matter about whether the non-singular statements science gives us are literally true. I call this view singulari…Read more
-
144Philosophy of perception as a guide to aestheticsIn Greg Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin & Jon Robson (eds.), Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2014.The aim of this paper is to argue that it is a promising avenue of research to consider philosophy of perception to be a guide to aesthetics. More precisely, my claim is that many, maybe even most, traditional problems in aesthetics are in fact about philosophy of perception that can, as a result, be fruitfully addressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception. This claim may sound provocative, but after qualifying what I mean by aesthetics (to be contrasted with ph…Read more
-
97Perceiving tropesErkenntnis 77 (1): 1-14. 2012.There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to the first one, perception is representational: it represents the world as being a certain way. According to the second, perception is a genuine relation between the perceiver and a token object. These two views are thought to be incompatible. My aim is to work out the least problematic version of the representational view of perception that preserves the most important considerations in favor of the relational view. Acc…Read more
-
41Evolutionary psychology and the selectionist model of neural development: A combined approachEvolution and Cognition 8 200-206. 2002.Evolutionary psychology and the selectionist theories of neural development are usually regarded as two unrelated theories addressing two logically distinct questions. The focus of evolutionary psychology is the phylogeny of the human mind, whereas the selectionist theories of neural development analyse the ontogeny of the mind. This paper will endeavour to combine these two approaches in the explanation of the human mind. Doing so might help in overcoming some of the criticisms of both theories…Read more
-
325Popper's Darwinian analogyPerspectives on Science 19 (3): 337-354. 2011.One of the most deeply entrenched ideas in Popper's philosophy is the analogy between the growth of scientific knowledge and the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. Popper gave his first exposition of these ideas very early on. In a letter to Donald Campbell, 1 Popper says that the idea goes back at least to the early thirties. 2 And he had a fairly detailed account of it in his "What is dialectic?", a talk given in 1937 and published in 1940: 3 If we want to explain why human thought tend…Read more
-
107Three Ways of Resisting RacismThe Monist 93 (2): 255-280. 2010.Two widespread strategies of resisting racism are the following. The first one is to deny the existence of races and thus block even the possibility of racist claims. The second one is to grant that races exist but insist that racial differences do not imply value differences. The aim of this paper is to outline a strategy of resisting racism that is weaker than the first but stronger than the second strategy: even if we accept that races exist, we can still deny that there are projectible racia…Read more
-
69Natural Properties and Bottomless DeterminationAmerical Philosophical Quarterly 51 215-226. 2014.It is widely held that some properties are more natural than others and that, as David Lewis put it, “an adequate theory of properties is one that recognises an objective difference between natural and unnatural properties” (Lewis 1983, p. 347). The general line of thought is that such ‘elitism’ about properties is justified as it can give simple and elegant solutions to a number of old metaphysical and philosophical problems. My aim is to analyze what these natural properties are: super-determi…Read more
-
125The Properties of Singular CausationThe Monist 92 (1): 112-132. 2009.Theories of singular causation have a genuine problem with properties. In virtue of what property do events (or facts) cause other events? One possible answer to this question, Davidson’s, is that causal relations hold between particulars and properties play no role in the way a particular causes another. According to another, recently fashionable answer, in contrast, events cause other events in virtue of having a trope (as opposed to a property-type). Both views face serious objections. My aim…Read more
-
265An experiential account of creativityIn Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, Oxford University Press. 2014.The aim of the paper is to argue that the difference between creative and non-creative mental processes is not a functional/computational, but an experiential one. In other words, what is distinctive about creative mental processes is not the functional/computational mechanism that leads to the emergence of a creative idea, be it the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space, but the way in which this mental process is experienced. The explanatory power of the fu…Read more
-
128Is twofoldness necessary for representational seeing?British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (3): 248-257. 2005.Richard Wollheim claimed that twofoldness is a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations and it is also a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. Jerrold Levinson pointed out that these two questions are different and argued that though twofoldness may be a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures, it cannot be a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations. I argue that Wollheim's use of the term ‘two…Read more
-
340The Dethroning of IdeocracyThe Monist 97 (1): 3-11. 2014.Paper on Robert Musil's philosophical system
-
583How to (and how not to) think about top-down influences on visual perceptionConsciousness and Cognition 47 17-25. 2017.The question of whether cognition can influence perception has a long history in neuroscience and philosophy. Here, we outline a novel approach to this issue, arguing that it should be viewed within the framework of top-down information-processing. This approach leads to a reversal of the standard explanatory order of the cognitive penetration debate: we suggest studying top-down processing at various levels without preconceptions of perception or cognition. Once a clear picture has emerged abou…Read more
-
78Group selection and our obsession with the grand questions of lifeThe Monist 93 (1): 76-95. 2010.The aim of this paper is to make an unlikely connection between the old question about the meaning of life and some important concepts in philosophy of biology. More precisely, I argue that while biology is unlikely to help us to figure out the meaning of life, the fact that this question has been considered to be such a crucial one could be explained with the help of some consideration of our evolutionary past. I argue that if there is evidence for group selection in the course of human evoluti…Read more
-
111Rational Reconstruction ReconsideredThe Monist 93 (4): 598-617. 2010.Here is a dilemma concerning the history of science. Can the history of scientific thought be reduced to the history of the beliefs, motives and actions of scientists? Or should we think of the history of scientific thought as in some sense independent from the history of scientists? The aim of this paper is to carve out an intermediate position between these two. I will argue that the history of scientific thought supervenes on, but not reducible to, the history of scientists. There is a legiti…Read more
-
724Imagination and PerceptionIn Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. 2016.Look at a red apple. Now close your eyes and visualize this apple. Your perceptual state and your imagery of the apple are very similar in some respects. They are also different in some respects. The aim of this paper is to address three questions about the relation between perception and imagination: -/- (a) How similar are perception and imagination and what explains this similarity? (b) How different are perception and imagination and what explains this difference? (c) How do perception and …Read more
-
153Perceiving picturesPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (4): 461-480. 2011.I aim to give a new account of picture perception: of the way our visual system functions when we see something in a picture. My argument relies on the functional distinction between the ventral and dorsal visual subsystems. I propose that it is constitutive of picture perception that our ventral subsystem attributes properties to the depicted scene, whereas our dorsal subsystem attributes properties to the picture surface. This duality elucidates Richard Wollheim’s concept of the “twofoldness” …Read more
-
98Cognitive penetration and the gallery of indiscernibles.Frontiers in Psychology 5. 2015.Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles thought experiment only works if we make assumptions about the cognitive impenetrability of perception, which we have strong empirical reasons to reject.
Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland