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108Harman on self referential thoughtsPhilosophical Issues 16 (1): 346-357. 2006.I will be concerned in these pages with the views that Gilbert Harman puts forward in his immensely stimulating paper Self-Reflexive Thoughts.<sup>1</sup> Harman maintains that self referential thoughts are possible, and also that they are useful. I applaud both of these claims. An example of a self referential thought is the thought that every thought, including this present one, has a logical structure. I feel sure that this thought exists, for I have entertained it on a number of occasions. M…Read more
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31Anti‐individualism: Mind and language, knowledge and justificationPhilosophical Books 50 (2): 112-123. 2009.
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60The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material WorldPhilosophical Review 110 (2): 300. 2001.As the subtitle indicates, this book is concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It recommends a novel and disturbingly pessimistic view about this topic that it calls “naturalistic mysterianism.” The view is naturalistic because it maintains that states of consciousness are reducible to physical properties of the brain. It counts as “mysterian” because it asserts that the physical properties in question are entirely beyond our ken—that they lie well beyond t…Read more
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56The Mysterious Flame (review)Philosophical Review 110 (2): 300-303. 2001.As the subtitle indicates, this book is concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It recommends a novel and disturbingly pessimistic view about this topic that it calls “naturalistic mysterianism.” The view is naturalistic because it maintains that states of consciousness are reducible to physical properties of the brain. It counts as “mysterian” because it asserts that the physical properties in question are entirely beyond our ken—that they lie well beyond t…Read more
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11Précis of Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic CorrespondencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1): 174-181. 2006.Brown University.
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714There Are Fewer Things in Reality Than Are Dreamt of in Chalmers’s Philosophy (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 445-454. 1999.Chalmers’s anti-materialist argument runs as follows
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37Susanna Schellenberg on perceptionMind and Language 37 (2): 208-218. 2022.Schellenberg's book The unity of perception is full of innovative ideas and challenges to preconceptions. This discussion endorses several of Schellenberg's main contentions, but it also challenges her handling of several key topics, such as hallucinations and perceptual awareness of particulars, and it expresses doubts about the informativeness of her main analytic tool, the notion of a perceptual capacity.
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119Perceptual RelativityPhilosophical Topics 44 (2): 179-200. 2016.Visual experience is shaped by a number of factors that are independent of the external objects that we perceive—factors like lighting, angle of view, and the sensitivities of photoreceptors in the retina. This paper seeks to catalog, analyze, and explain the fluctuations in visual phenomenology that are due to such factors.
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86Précis of thought and world: An austere portrayal of truth, reference, and semantic correspondence (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1). 2006.Thought and World has three main concerns.1 First, it presents and defends a deflationary theory of propositional truth—that is, a deflationary theory of the concept of truth that figures in claims like the proposition that snow is white is true. I have long admired the deflationary theory of truth that Paul Horwich developed in the eighties, but I have also had substantial misgivings about that theory.2 In writing TW I was concerned to formulate an alternative view that enjoys the virtues of Ho…Read more
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104Précis of Consciousness (review)Philosophical Studies 161 (3): 483-487. 2012.Précis of Consciousness Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9813-3 Authors Christopher S. Hill, Department of Philosophy, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116
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40Perceptual Existentialism SustainedErkenntnis 86 (6): 1391-1410. 2019.There are two main accounts of what it is for external objects to be presented in visual experience. According to particularism, particular objects are built into the representational contents of experiences. Existentialism is a quite different view. According to existentialism, the representational contents of perceptual experiences are general rather than particular, in the sense that the contents can be fully captured by existentially quantified statements. The present paper is a defense of e…Read more
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16Problems From Reid, By James Van Cleve Oxford University Press, 2016Analytic Philosophy 59 (4): 515-526. 2018.
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59Gupta has built a magnificent mansion, but can we live in it?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1): 236-242. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 236-242, January 2022.
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40Can Carey answer Quine?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 132-133. 2011.In order to defend her claim that the concept object is biologically determined, Carey must answer Quine's gavagai argument, which purports to show that mastery of any concept with determinate reference presupposes a substantial repertoire of logical concepts. I maintain that the gavagai argument withstands the experimental data that Carey provides, but that it yields to an a priori argument
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25Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, by Anil GuptaMind 132 (525): 251-259. 2023.This dazzlingly original and ambitious book challenges the epistemological and metaphysical preconceptions of contemporary philosophers on many fronts, and prop.
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14Précis of Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic CorrespondencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1): 174-181. 2006.I thank the commentators for their extremely rich and stimulating discussions of Thought and World.1 Their commentaries show that a number of TW’s claims are in need of clarification and defense, and that some of its arguments contain substantial lacunae. I am very pleased to have these flaws called to my attention, and to have an opportunity to try to correct them. Also, I am grateful for the commentators’ endorsements. As is perhaps inevitable in a symposium of this kind, the commentaries cont…Read more
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91Sensations: A Defense of Type MaterialismCambridge University Press. 1991.This is a book about sensory states and their apparent characteristics. It confronts a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological questions and presents an argument for type materialism: the view that sensory states are identical with the neural states with which they are correlated. According to type materialism, sensations are only possessed by human beings and members of related biological species; silicon-based androids cannot have sensations. The author rebuts several other rival theo…Read more
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26Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness (edited book)MIT Press. 2014.Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influen…Read more
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65Perceptual Existentialism SustainedErkenntnis 86 (6): 1-20. 2019.There are two main accounts of what it is for external objects to be presented in visual experience. According to particularism, particular objects are built into the representational contents of experiences. Existentialism is a quite different view. According to existentialism, the representational contents of perceptual experiences are general rather than particular, in the sense that the contents can be fully captured by existentially quantified statements. The present paper is a defense of e…Read more
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659Hawthorne’s Lottery Puzzle and the Nature of BeliefPhilosophical Issues 17 (1): 120-122. 2007.In the first chapter of his Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne argues that thinkers do not ordinarily know lottery propositions. His arguments depend on claims about the intimate connections between knowledge and assertion, epistemic possibility, practical reasoning, and theoretical reasoning. In this paper, we cast doubt on the proposed connections. We also put forward an alternative picture of belief and reasoning. In particular, we argue that assertion is governed by a Gricean constraint…Read more
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83Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (review)Philosophical Review 122 (3): 511-518. 2013.
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179Impossible Worlds and Metaphysical Explanation: Comments on Kment’s Modality and Explanatory ReasoningAnalysis 77 (1): 134-148. 2017.In this critical notice of Kment's _Modality and Explanatory Reasoning_, we focus on Kment’s arguments for impossible worlds and on a key part of his discussion of the interactions between modality and explanation – the analogy that he draws between scientific and metaphysical explanation.
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